Pristine Waters Observatories – Where Eco and Soft Robotics Meet 

Eco-robots are essential to explore uncharted areas of our ocean while leaving marine environments untouched. Pristine waters are a theater of protected species and of key phenomena that sustain marine biodiversity, often they are located in remote areas, hence difficult to navigate because of their wilderness and unknown morphology. Merging soft materials and soft robotics with eco-robotics opens new sampling and monitoring avenues as well as novel research branches. The hybrid integration of highly reconfigurable marine robots and unconventional bioinspired grippers is a particularly interesting use case. Such a solution can undertake delicate sampling, for the study of fragile living organisms, it can also aid with the challenge of the ocean clean-up which becomes arduous in the case of ghost gear removal, inspiring a novel contest for robotic control and dexter manipulation.