How will these robots appear in our lives and how will we interact, and live, with them? We can foresee smart skins, assist and medical devices, biodegradable and environmental robots or intelligent soft robots. For example, the compliance of soft robotics makes them ideally suited for direct interaction with biological tissue.

The researchers planted a soft controller in the Octobot’s body that shunts liquid hydrogen peroxide through platinum reaction chambers, turning the fluid fuel to oxygen gas and water vapor. The gas pumps up the legs though tiny channels running from the body, making the gummy tentacles twitch—a big step in soft robotics.

“Every problem in mechanical engineering has been addressed with more weight, more power and more stiffness,” said Mr. Griffith, co-founder and chief executive of Otherlab. “But nature—the real world—is squiggly.”

Mr. Griffith is at the forefront of a movement known as soft robotics, which aims to revolutionize the way we think about building things.

In the field of service robotics, whole arm contact with an unstructured environment or human beings becomes a major issue. Therefore soft robots, which mean robots with passively (or mechanically) compliant joints, become more and more important.