Soft robotic manipulators are continuum robots made of soft materials and flexible components. The goal of soft robotic manipulators research is to enable these manipulators to adapt their shapes to cluttered environments and to have safer interactions with human. However, there is still a problem with effectively using soft robotic manipulators in practical applications. The challenges of soft robotic manipulators in terms of materials and structure design, stiffness control, perception, and function control remain to be overcome. Here, an overview of recent advances in this field is presented, covering device architectures, actuation, variable stiffness, and sensing. Actuator technologies are discussed and roughly divided into three categories: a) tendon‐driven actuation, b) fluidic actuation, and c) stimuli‐responsive actuation, which is based on smart materials. Considering the working principle of stiffness variation technologies, stiffness variation technologies can be divided into two categories: a) using the interactions between structural elements, b) direct material rigidity tuning strategies. A briefly review of soft sensing technologies is presented. From the functional perspective, sensor technologies are divide into two categories: proprioception and exteroception. A conception for designing soft robotic manipulators is proposed from the perspective of soft robotic manipulator applications. Finally, the challenges this field faces are discussed.

Triphibious robots can move in more complex environment compared with common mobile robots, which makes the triphibious robots have a wider movement space and better environmental adaptability. This paper proposes an innovative design solution of a triphibious robot with the tilting-rotor structure (TR-TRS), which can change its motion mode to perform smoothly transition between different media, such as land, water, and air. First, the mechanical structure of the triphibious robot is described with design diagrams. Two tilting-rotors are mounted on the left and right side of a quadrotor-like aerial platform, in which four legs with passive wheel are integrated to make the triphibious robot move on land. Tiltingrotor structure is used to change the orientation of the rotors on both sides of the robot's fuselage, thus, through adjusting the orientation of these two rotors they can drive the triphibious robot to move on land and underwater. Next, according to the mechanical design, the motion modes in different environmental media are given, and the transition methods between different motion modes are explained in detail. Finally, the influence of tilting-rotor structure on the performance of the designed triphibious robot is analyzed and discussed by the results of virtual simulation. The superior performance of tilting-rotor structure in triphibious robots is demonstrated through the comparison of existing robots. INDEX TERMSTriphibious robots, structure design, tilting rotor, performance analysis.