Physical structures were generated for soft robots using an evolutionary algorithm that determined where actuated material should be placed versus passive materials.
J. Hiller and H. Lipson. Automatic design and manufacture of soft robots. Robotics, IEEE Transactions on, 28(2):457–466, 2012. doi:10.1109/TRO.2011.2172702.
This paper proposes a kinematic model for soft robots that fits a deformable curve to a virtual-rigid-link model in order to model fluidic elastomer actuators.
G. Runge, M. Wiese, L. Günther and A. Raatz, A framework for the kinematic modeling of soft
material robots combining finite element analysis and piecewise constant curvature kinematics, 2017 3rd International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics (ICCAR), 7-14 (2017) doi:10.1109/ICCAR.2017.7942652.
This paper presents a dynamic model that describes the relationship between forces on an octopus arm (muscle, gravity, buoyancy, drag and internal) and its motion, relying on simplifications such as discretizing the arm into segments.
Yekutieli, Y. et al, Dynamic model of the octopus arm, I. biomechanics of the
octopus reaching movement. J. Neurophysiol. 94, 1443–1458 (2005). doi:10.1152/jn.00684.2004