Soft grippers offer gentle interaction with objects, significantly reducing the risk of damage. Their compliance in both material and structure allows them to adapt to a wide variety of object shapes and sizes. However, the deformable nature of soft grippers poses challenges for integrating precise proprioception and tactile sensing, especially when aiming for large-area high-resolution tactile perception. In nature, the elephant's trunk exemplifies an ideal combination of compliance and tactile sensitivity, enabling it to delicately manipulate diverse objects without causing damage while also exploring its surroundings through touch. Inspired by this, we present EleTac, a soft vision-based tactile gripper that enables safe object grasping via a pinch-like motion and delivers high-resolution full-surface tactile feedback for integrated proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensing. Experimental results demonstrate that even with a simple control strategy, EleTac can robustly grasp and lift a variety of objects, exhibiting strong adaptability and generalization. Furthermore, the seamless integration of grasping and tactile sensing capabilities facilitates practical applications, including exploration and excavation in granular media, as well as adaptive surface following. Overall, EleTac validates the 'manipulator-as-sensor' design philosophy, achieving high-quality tactile feedback without requiring additional sensing modules.

Tasks involving exploration and inspection of narrow environments demand a robot to have a flexible body. Such a robot is especially preferred if the integrity of its surrounding is crucial, as in endoscopy procedures. We propose the design of a small, self-propelled soft robot that can operate in a constrained environment. By periodic activation of a series of pneumatic actuators fabricated using a casting technique, sinusoidal locomotion is achieved. The wave-like locomotive strategy with an additional support mechanism enabled movement in multiple scenarios, including traveling horizontally and vertically in environments of different characteristics. Two analytical models are presented to highlight the design characteristics. The first predicts the velocity of the robot in relation to the working conditions, while the second calculates the force that the robot body exerts on its surroundings. Its mobility was tested in simple and complex routes under rigid and elastic environments. The resulting percent errors for the predictions of velocity and lateral force are 7.89% and 16.86%, respectively. In terms of performance, the robot can move horizontally in rigid tubes even if the walls are lubricated, and can achieve a peak speed of 40.11 mm/s, or 0.171 Body-Length/s (BL/s). With the addition of a tail balloon, the robot also successfully ascended a vertical tube with a maximum speed of 9.22 mm/s (or 0.039 BL/s). The presented work is expected to pave the way toward feasible robotic applications, such as pipe inspection.