We are excited to announce the release of Cushion, an open-source tool developed within the Soft BioRobotics Perception group by Trevor Exley and Anderson Nardin.

Cushion was created to support the design of soft robotic systems by integrating SOFA Framework simulations into the Grasshopper environment. The plugin allows researchers and designers to move from parametric geometry to soft-body simulation while staying within an iterative design workflow.

Cashion plugin page

With Cushion, soft robots can be designed, actuated, simulated, and evaluated before fabrication, helping reduce trial-and-error prototyping and enabling faster exploration of deformable robotic concepts.

The project is now available on GitHub and food4Rhino, together with examples to help users get started.

We invite the soft robotics and computational design communities to try Cushion and share feedback, ideas, and applications.