Soft robotic grippers

In plain language

A normal robot gripper is made of hard metal parts and grips by squeezing with strong, precise force. A soft gripper is made of rubber-like or other flexible materials that bend and wrap around an object. Because the fingers conform to the shape of what they hold, the gripper can often pick up fragile items without needing exact positioning.

Most soft grippers are moved by air or fluid pressure, although researchers also use electric, magnetic and heat-driven methods. Some designs use suction instead of fingers. The main trade-off is that soft parts are harder to control precisely and, in some designs, wear out faster.

Technical explanation

Soft grippers are usually classed by how they move and how they grip. A 2018 review in Advanced Materials by Shintake and colleagues grouped soft gripping approaches into three families: actuation, controlled stiffness and controlled adhesion. Actuation covers how the fingers bend or open. Controlled stiffness lets a soft structure become rigid when needed, and controlled adhesion uses surface effects to hold objects.

A common actuator design is the pneumatic network, or pneu-net, in which a soft elastomer contains a set of connected air chambers. Mosadegh and colleagues (2014) reported a pneu-net actuator that bent from a linear to a quasi-circular shape in about 50 milliseconds at 345 kPa and kept working over a million cycles in laboratory tests. That result is for a single actuator, not a complete gripper.

A different route is vacuum gripping. Villegas Diaz and colleagues (2019) presented a vacuum-driven origami gripper that folds around objects and lifts a range of items, including delicate foods and heavy bottles, in tests. The 2025 review by Zhang and colleagues covers fluid pressure, mechanical force, electric, magnetic and thermal actuation, along with hydrogels, shape memory alloys, magnetic materials and liquid metals. The reviewed sources do not give a single agreed measure of grip force or payload across designs, so direct comparisons between published grippers need care.

What the evidence says

Each statement is typed by the strength of its evidence and linked to the source that supports it.

Limitations and open problems

• Control precision is listed as an open challenge in the 2018 review (Shintake and colleagues, 2018).
• Miniaturisation, robustness, speed and sensor integration are also listed as open challenges (Shintake and colleagues, 2018).
• The tests reported by Villegas Diaz and colleagues are the authors' own grasping and load tests, so performance in cluttered, real-world settings is not established by the sources reviewed here (Villegas Diaz and colleagues, 2019).
• The pneu-net result is for a single actuator in laboratory tests, not a complete gripper (Mosadegh and colleagues, 2014).

Possible future uses

Product concepts: Dressing and bathing assist robot, Household bin that sorts waste for recycling, Soft fruit picking gripper

Timeline

1. Apr 2014Mosadegh and colleagues publish pneu-net soft actuators that bend rapidly and survive over a million lab cycles in Advanced Functional Materials. Sources: [2]
2. May 2018Shintake and colleagues publish a review of soft robotic grippers in Advanced Materials, grouping approaches into actuation, controlled stiffness and controlled adhesion. Sources: [1]
3. May 2019Villegas Diaz and colleagues present a vacuum-driven origami soft gripper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Sources: [3]
4. 27 Oct 2025Zhang and colleagues publish a review of soft robotic grippers covering actuation methods and materials in Frontiers in Materials. Sources: [4]

Futures this could help bring about

How far away?

Crops picked by robots instead of people

Pilots · 3 of 8 steps done

How far away?

Humanoid robots in the home

Engineering prototypes · 4 of 9 steps done

How far away?

Robots that can pick any item in a warehouse

Pilots · 3 of 8 steps done

Related breakthroughs

• Hybrid humanoid finger grasps tofu and pinches 0.1 mm paper in lab tests (12 Nov 2025)

Glossary

Elastomer

A rubber-like polymer that can be stretched or bent and then return to its shape.

Pneu-net

A soft actuator made of connected air chambers that inflate and bend when pressurised.

Actuation

The means by which a device produces movement, such as air pressure, electric fields or magnetism.

Compliance

How easily a structure deforms when a force is applied; soft grippers are highly compliant.

Sources

1. review article
   Soft Robotic Grippers
   Jun Shintake, Vito Cacucciolo, Dario Floreano et al.. Advanced Materials, May 2018. DOI: 10.1002/adma.201707035. Accessed 21 Oct 2026.
2. peer reviewed paper
   Pneumatic Networks for Soft Robotics that Actuate Rapidly
   Bobak Mosadegh, Panagiotis Polygerinos, Christoph Keplinger et al.. Advanced Functional Materials, Apr 2014. DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201303288. Accessed 21 Oct 2026.
3. conference paper
   A Vacuum-driven Origami Magic-ball Soft Gripper
   Evelin Villegas Diaz, Robert J. Wood, John J. Stampfli et al.. IEEE, Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2019. Accessed 21 Oct 2026.
4. review article
   Soft robotic grippers: a review
   Youyou Zhang, Jianhao Man, Xiaoang Liu et al.. Frontiers in Materials, 27 Oct 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fmats.2025.1692206. Accessed 21 Oct 2026.

Revision history

3 changes since this profile was created.