  Agricultural robotics and automation are facing some challenges rooted in the
high variability 9 of products, task complexity, crop quality requirement, and
dense vegetation. Such a set of 10 challenges demands a more versatile and safe
robotic system. Soft robotics is a young yet 11 promising field of research
aimed to enhance these aspects of current rigid robots which 12 makes it a good
candidate solution for that challenge. In general, it aimed to provide robots
13 and machines with adaptive locomotion (Ansari et al., 2015), safe and
adaptive manipulation 14 (Arleo et al., 2020) and versatile grasping (Langowski
et al., 2020). But in agriculture, soft 15 robots have been mainly used in
harvesting tasks and more specifically in grasping. In this 16 chapter, we
review a candidate group of soft grippers that were used for handling and 17
harvesting crops regarding agricultural challenges i.e. safety in handling and
adaptability to 18 the high variation of crops. The review is aimed to show why
and to what extent soft grippers 19 have been successful in handling
agricultural tasks. The analysis carried out on the results 20 provides future
directions for the systematic design of soft robots in agricultural tasks.
