Soft Robotics is becoming increasingly popular. The number of publications in this field is steadily growing and the community of scientists taking this challenge is steadily growing.

FET has already been instrumental to the birth and growth of Soft Robotics, funding seminal projects like OCTOPUS (FET Proactive “Embodied Intelligence”) and funding the RoboSoft CA (FET Open).

Despite the active efforts of the scientific community, which is already producing remarkable results, a stronger development of soft robots still poses big challenges that require large and coordinated efforts.

Among them, a theoretical framework for designing soft robots, for modelling the morphological computation in them, for controlling their movements and behaviour can make the difference and bring Soft Robotics to make a step change.

The science of soft materials that can be used to build soft robots providing them with proper embodied intelligence is also fundamental for soft robotics at this time. There are enormous challenges for roboticists working in this field that could extremely fruitfully be taken together with material scientists.

In addition to this, energy issues are a frontier research topics in soft robotics. It is very much so in many research contexts, but soft robotics can enlighten scenarios where energy can be harvested from soft materials or just saved by morphological computation mechanisms increasing overall efficiency.

Soft Robotics represents a key technology for robotics of the future and for really bringing robots to the level required for real-world service applications. Soft Robotics still represents a disruptive approach in robotics, which well deserves a FET Proactive initiative. Soft Robotics is no more robotics, or robotics only. It is in fact the combination of many disciplines, including and foremost basic sciences, and the challenges it poses can only be taken by an interdisciplinary approach.