A novel antagonistic stiffening mechanism will be applied to continuum soft robots. Further, I will investigate computational models to achieve real-time position and stiffness control for these emerging robots. My field of clinical application is colo-rectal surgery. There are 0.7m new rectal cancer cases each year worldwide being the second most common cancer in Europe. For this surgery-specific scenarios, the proposed medical tool has to meet dimensional limitations in order to be deployed in a minimally invasive manner and exert up to 5N at the manipulator’s tip.