The emerging field of soft robotics presents a new paradigm for robot design in which "precision through rigidity" is replaced by "cognition through compliance." Lightweight and flexible, soft robots have vast potential to interact with fragile objects and navigate unstructured environments. Like octopuses and worms in nature, soft robots' flexible bodies conform to hard objects and reconfigure for different tasks, delegating the burden of control from brain to body through embodied cognition. However, because of the lack of efficient modeling and simulation tools, soft robots are primarily designed by hand. Typically, hard components from rigid robots or living creatures are heuristically substituted for comparable soft ones.

Robots have advanced an enormous amount over the past few years, in both hardware and software, and the next few years promise even more advancements. It's exciting, but we're nowhere close to the efficiency and capability of animals, and it's going to be a while before humans are able to create anything to match their level of elegance, especially when it comes to powered motion. One way to avoid playing catch-up with animals all of the time is to simply steal everything you can from them as directly as possible. Or heck, why stop with bioinspiration when you can instead hijack animals directly by wiring up a cybernetic beetle? These approaches are useful in certain situations, but ideally, you'd want to be able to leverage all of actual animal magic that you get with cybernetics and work it into the kind of bioinspired robots that you can design to do exactly what you want.