Soft Robotics – a New Perspective.- A Brief Historical Overview on the Progress of Soft Robotics.- Gradient-based Optimization for Soft Robots.- Dynamic Modeling of Soft Robots – the Constant Strain Approach.- Port-Hamiltonian Cosserat Models for Soft Robots – Beyond the Constant Strain Approach.- Sorotoki: a MATLAB Toolkit for Soft Robots.- Conclusions and Recommendations.- Appendix.