Pengyu Zhou

South China Agricultural University, Fudan University

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Pengyu Zhou is a rising innovator in soft robotics, specializing in bio-inspired gripper design that bridges the gap between delicate manipulation and high-load capacity. His research focuses on rigid-soft hybrid systems and bistable mechanisms, drawing inspiration from natural grasping strategies to solve real-world challenges in unstructured environments. Zhou’s major contributions include the development of a helical bistable soft gripper, which uses pneumatic actuation to achieve energy-efficient, high-load grasping of diverse objects—a design directly inspired by helical motions found in nature. This work, published in 2024, has already garnered early citations for its novel approach to combining bistability with soft robotics. In 2025, Zhou advanced the field further with a human finger-inspired rigid-soft hybrid gripper, addressing the critical limitation of actuation speed in hybrid systems. This innovation enables damage-free, rapid grasping of moving objects, a significant step forward for applications in manufacturing and logistics. With a growing citation footprint and a clear trajectory toward practical, high-performance robotic hands, Zhou’s work is shaping the next generation of adaptive, energy-efficient grippers for dynamic environments.