Raw LLM Responses

"So I have been thinking about how I can enter the [soft] robotics industry, which I have been studying design for, from undergraduate to graduate." There isn't really a meaningful generalized market for soft robotics. I think this is probably even true in fashion design unless you successfully carve yourself a strange niche in high fashion. Most people who study it formally don't work in it. Most people who work in it are in academia. I work at a non-academic soft robotics engineering company and lead core parts of the R&D but I didn't do my Ph.D. in it!  That doesn't mean you can't make soft robotics part of your creative personal practice, but don't expect to get a job in it as an employee somewhere. If you want to work partially or mostly with soft robotics in the future, that is most likely to happen as part of an individual idea you spin into a working business plan, or something you bring into your practice subsidized by other activities. "Do I need to apply for a PhD? As a person who has no foundation in mechanics and programming (I know that some courses can be studied online), but as a person who has focused on design for years, this span is a little too big." You should only do a Ph.D. if you're in love with the specific subject, and I do expect a lot of soft robotics Ph.D. programs, even those with a fashion design element, can get very technical. But the mechanics and programming are easier than ever to learn in some ways, so if you dedicate yourself to it on your own you can probably build some good skills.  There's not really a roadmap but I'd learn basic Python and then start playing with basic projects in GPU-accelerated simulation along with some stupidly simple practical builds to validate. If you want your soft robot elements to do very complicated things, you'll probably want to combine simulation with reinforcement learning. Although this is highly technical stuff, if you have a clear idea of what you want to do, and