Josh Bongard "Soft robotics is maybe an unfortunate name for this type of robotics because soft robots are sort of traditional robotics as non-linear dynamics to linear dynamics. Linear dynamics are sort of in a specific case of non-linear dynamics where the non-linearity is its intrinsic identity.

One of the interesting work done by Josh's lab: "deeply- damaged robots to try and recover, they weren't able to recover so much by adapting their control policy and keeping their damaged shape constant. Instead, evolution was better able to find a compensating shape for the robot. In some cases, the damaged robot would grow back the lost limbs and it could carry on moving with its pre-damaged control policy".