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About

Jie Pi is a leading researcher in agricultural robotics, specializing in bio-inspired soft grippers and flexible end-effectors for precision fruit harvesting. Their work addresses a critical challenge in modern agriculture: designing robotic hands gentle enough to handle delicate produce without damage. Pi’s most cited paper, “An Octopus-Inspired Bionic Flexible Gripper for Apple Grasping” (2021, 56 citations), pioneered a three-finger soft robot gripper that mimics the variable rigidity of an octopus tentacle, enabling unprecedented dexterity and precision for apple picking. Building on this, Pi developed a flexible underactuated end-effector for tomato harvesting (2022, 28 citations) that accounts for the fruit’s fragility, and further refined the design by analyzing the physical characteristics of tomatoes to optimize fluidic elastomer actuators (2022, 23 citations). Their simulation-based study of cluster tomato picking strategies (2022, 15 citations) demonstrates a systematic approach to translating human picking behavior into robotic design. With over 120 total citations, Pi’s work is foundational for the next generation of soft, adaptive agricultural robots, directly supporting the industrialization of fruit-harvesting automation and advancing precision agriculture.