“…They have some unique and highly distinctive features when compared with rigid bodied robots: such as smooth bending, inherent compliance (Rucker and Webster, 2011a), reduced weight, and increased fault tolerance (Godage et al, 2011b). Continuum arms also have excellent potential for adaptive whole arm grasping (McMahan and Walker, 2008;Li and Xiao, 2011), obstacle avoidance (Godage et al, 2012a), navigation in highly unstructured, narrow and obstructed environments (Xiao and Vatcha, 2010), minimally invasive surgery Lyons et al, 2009;Penning et al, 2011;Simaan et al, 2004;Rucker and Webster, 2011b), inspection tasks (Mehling et al, 2006), and human friendly interaction . In light of these advantages, continuum and soft robotics has become an area of major importance in bio-inspired robotics.…”