Systematic engineering design helps creating new soft machines

Soft robotics is an emerging feld in the robotics community which deals with completely newtypes of robots. However, often new soft robotic designs depend on the ingenuity of theengineer rather being systematically derived.For this reason, in order to support the engineer in the design process, we present a designmethodology for general technical systems in this paper and explain it in depth in the contextof soft robotics. The design methodologyconsists of a combination of state-of-the-art engineering concepts that are arranged in such away that the engineeris guided through the design process. The efectiveness of a systematic approach in softrobotics is illustrated on thedesign of a new gecko-inspired, climbing soft robot.