Research Status and Application Prospect of Underwater Soft Gripper

With the increasing demand for marine resource development and environmental protection, underwater robots have an urgent need for flexible, safe, and efficient soft grasping technology. This paper described three main actuation design methods for underwater soft grippers: fluid variable pressure drive, cable drive, and smart material drive. Based on this, the research progress of key technologies such as bio-inspired design, stiffness adjustment technology, integration of grasping and perception, and multi-modal grasping was analyzed. Combined with typical application scenarios such as marine waste cleanup, aquatic product fishing, underwater archaeology, and cultural relic protection, as well as biological sample collection, the unique advantages of soft grippers in non-destructive sampling, adaptability to multiple types of objects, and fine operations in the deep sea were analyzed. Finally, the future research directions of underwater soft grippers were prospected, and it is pointed out that efforts should be focused on the research and development of high-performance underwater intelligent materials, the integration of multiple driving methods, and the optimization of energy and control systems, so as to promote the evolution of the gripper towards deep sea and intelligentization and achieve reliable underwater operations in all scenarios.