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About

Zhuyin Shao is a pioneering roboticist whose work sits at the intersection of soft robotics, origami engineering, and deep-sea exploration. Shao’s research focuses on developing shape-morphing, bio-inspired robots capable of navigating and manipulating objects in the most extreme environments on Earth. A landmark contribution is the “Soft Origami Gripper with Variable Effective Length” (2021, 65 citations), which draws inspiration from nature’s shape-changing abilities to create actuators that adapt to complex surroundings. This work laid the foundation for a series of deep-sea innovations, including a “Miniature deep-sea morphable robot with multimodal locomotion” (2025, 50 citations) — a centimeter-scale soft actuator designed for the crushing pressures of the ocean abyss. Shao has also advanced autonomous aquatic manipulation, introducing an underwater robotic system with a soft continuum manipulator controlled by reinforcement learning (2023, 25 citations). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shao developed a tapered soft robotic oropharyngeal swab (2021, 24 citations) to reduce infection risk for healthcare workers. More recently, Shao has engineered nitinol-embedded wearable grippers and sensorized soft fingers for delicate deep-sea specimen collection, integrating force estimation and interactive capabilities. With a growing citation record exceeding 185 total citations, Shao is shaping the future of soft, adaptive robots for exploration and healthcare.