Automated design of 4D-printed soft robots

Soft robotics, a burgeoning field at the intersection of materials science, robotics, and computer science, has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years. Among these innovations, 4D printing has emerged as a transformative technology that enables the convenient production of arbitrarily complex and previously unrealizable soft robots, which can reconfigure themselves in response to external stimuli and sense their state and surroundings. Automated design methods are essential to exploring the vast space of possible designs and finding bespoke soft robot designs for specific tasks and environments. This chapter discusses recent developments in automated design methods for 4D-printed soft robots. They combine computer simulation, physical experimentation, and efficient optimization algorithms which exploit 4D printing capabilities and generate efficacious and unique designs unimaginable to human designers.