The development of soft continuum manipulators has reached a certain level of maturity in research by both taking inspiration from nature and by exploiting new technological approaches. The overarching goal is to build systems that can adapt to the environment and perform grasping and manipulation tasks with high versatility in terms of payloads and different type of objects. In the artificial designs, it is important to avoid discretization of the embedded functionalities and material characteristics, in order to develop systems that have high robustness and reliability, as well as versatility. Several soft and hybrid soft/hard robots have been demonstrated. However, many bottlenecks still exist in order to incorporate within their structure, the distributed actuation and sensing, and to develop efficient control strategies, as well as to develop reliable systems that can operate in the real world.
On the other hand, many applications can benefit from the development of efficient soft continuum manipulators, at different scales, and that can operate in various environments like air and water, and in the human body.

In this workshop we aim to gather experts in engineering, material science, computer science, and robotics to highlight the interesting characteristics of the current approaches, discuss their pros and cons and delineate the main issues to be solved. Moreover, the range of possible applications will be discussed to provide insights and guidelines on the next steps to be accomplished by the research community for real world operation. In this workshop we aim to gather experts in engineering, material science, computer science, and robotics to highlight the interesting characteristics of the current approaches, discuss their pros and cons and delineate the main issues to be solved. Moreover, the range of possible applications will be discussed to provide insights and guidelines on the next steps to be accomplished by the research community for real world operation.