Bio-Inspired Optimization in Soft Robot Design: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Soft robots offer significant advantages in adaptability, safe interactions, and operation in unstructured environments, yet their design faces unique challenges due to infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear material behavior, and coupled multi-physics interactions. Bio-inspired optimization methods have emerged as a powerful tool to navigate these complex design spaces. While individual optimization paradigms have been reviewed separately, no single survey has systematically compared all major method families side by side for soft robot design or provided cross-method selection guidelines. This review fills that gap with a broad, method-centric survey. We classify and compare evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, topology optimization, and emerging machine-learning-assisted approaches. A cross-method comparison framework with practical selection guidelines is presented. Representative applications covering robot body design, actuator geometry, multi-material distribution, and sensing-control co-optimization are analyzed for each method category. Open-source simulation platforms and topology optimization codes are also catalogued. Finally, we outline future directions including computational scalability, optimization-to-fabrication integration, sim-to-real transfer, benchmarking and standardization, multi-objective optimization, and autonomous design pipelines from biological inspiration to fabricated prototypes.