  Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving
complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify
the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects.
Adoption of soft robotics by academia and industry, however, has been slow and
this is, in-part, due to the amount of hardware and software that must be
developed from scratch for each use of soft system components. In this paper we
detail the design, fabrication and validation of an open-source framework that
we designed to lower the barrier to entry for integrating soft robotic
subsystems. This framework is built on ROS (the Robot Operating System) and we
use it to demonstrate a modular, soft-hard hybrid system which is capable of
completing pick and place tasks. By lowering this barrier to entry we hope that
system designers and researchers will find it easy to integrate soft components
into their existing ROS-enabled robotic systems.
