Bio-inspired Soft Grippers for Biological Applications

The field of bio-inspired soft grippers has emerged as a transformative area of research with profound implications for biomedical applications. This book chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the principles, developments, challenges, and prospects of soft grippers that draw inspiration from biological systems. Bio-inspired soft grippers have gained prominence due to their unique characteristics, including compliance, adaptability, and biocompatibility. They have revolutionized the way we approach biomedical tasks, offering safer interactions with delicate tissues and enabling complex operations that were once inconceivable with rigid tools. The chapter delves into the fundamental importance of soft grippers in biomedical contexts. It outlines their significance in surgeries, diagnostics, tissue engineering, and various medical interventions. Soft grippers have the capacity to mimic the intricate movements of biological organisms, facilitating minimally invasive procedures and enhancing patient outcomes. A historical perspective traces the evolution of soft grippers in biomedical research, highlighting key milestones and breakthroughs. From early attempts to emulate the dexterity of octopus tentacles to the latest advancements in soft lithography and biomaterials, the journey has been marked by ingenuity and collaboration across multiple disciplines. Motivations for adopting soft grippers in biomedical applications are explored, emphasizing their ability to reduce invasiveness, increase precision, and provide adaptability to complex anatomical structures. The requirements and challenges in designing grippers fit for medical contexts are outlined, encompassing biocompatibility, sterilization, control, and integration.

Advances in soft grasping in agriculture

Agricultural robotics and automation are facing some challenges rooted in the high variability 9 of products, task complexity, crop quality requirement, and dense vegetation. Such a set of 10 challenges demands a more versatile and safe robotic system. Soft robotics is a young yet 11 promising field of research aimed to enhance these aspects of current rigid robots which 12 makes it a good candidate solution for that challenge. In general, it aimed to provide robots 13 and machines with adaptive locomotion (Ansari et al., 2015), safe and adaptive manipulation 14 (Arleo et al., 2020) and versatile grasping (Langowski et al., 2020). But in agriculture, soft 15 robots have been mainly used in harvesting tasks and more specifically in grasping. In this 16 chapter, we review a candidate group of soft grippers that were used for handling and 17 harvesting crops regarding agricultural challenges i.e. safety in handling and adaptability to 18 the high variation of crops. The review is aimed to show why and to what extent soft grippers 19 have been successful in handling agricultural tasks. The analysis carried out on the results 20 provides future directions for the systematic design of soft robots in agricultural tasks.