Dexterous manipulation is one of the primary goals in robotics (Billard and Kragic in Science 364(6446):1149, 2019 [1]). Inspired by the movement of soft tissues such as the elephant trunk and octopus’s tentacles, the soft manipulator is a kind of special manipulator that uses soft materials or flexible structure to perform manipulation tasks through continuous motion control under the action of specific continuous drive mode. The definition of soft material is based on the elastic modulus of the biological tendon (about 1 GPa), which can be regarded as soft material if it is less than 1 GPa (Rus and Tolley in Nature 521:467–475, 2015 [2]). It is an under-actuated system that performs infinite freedom motion through limited control variables (Singh and Krishna in Univ J Mech Eng 2(6):193–198, 2014 [3]; Laschi et al. in Sci Robot 1:eaah3690, 2016 [4]) which is essentially different from the rigid manipulator (Xu and Wang in IEEE/CAA J Autom Sin 8(9):1500–1522, 2021 [5]).