  Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize
human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the
potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings.
In this work, inspired by spider monkeys' tails, we propose a hybrid soft robot
(HSR) design. We detail the design objectives and methodology to improve the
controllable stiffness range and achieve independent stiffness and shape
control. We extend the curve parametric approach to We experimentally
demonstrate that the proposed HSR has about a 100% stiffness range increase
than a previous soft robot design with identical physical dimensions. In
addition, we empirically map HSR's bending shape-pressure-stiffness and present
an application example - a soft robotic gripper - to demonstrate the decoupled
nature of stiffness and shape variations. Experimental results show that
proposed HSR can be successfully used in applications where independent
stiffness and shape control is desired.
