As an emerging robotics technology, soft exoskeleton incorporates soft drives and wearable structure, efficiently solves the problems of traditional rigid exoskeleton robots, such as heavy weight, poor compliance, low efficiency and poor wearing comfort. It is suitable for the walking assistance and movement rehabilitation of the patients with motor dysfunctions and has become one of the main developing directions in the field of active rehabilitation. This review focuses on the research development of innovation and application of soft exoskeleton in recent 10 years, collects and sorts out 60 target papers, which include 50 papers about cable drives, 7 papers about pneumatic drives and 3 papers about other drives. This paper analyzes and discusses the related researches from three aspects: soft drive structure design, control method and rehabilitation application. Currently, the soft exoskeleton research is mainly on cable drive and position control. The development direction is the equipment weight lightening and drive compliance, which combines electrophysiological signal research and human-computer interaction theory to reduce human metabolism. The related clinical trials show that the soft exoskeleton is beneficial to increase the symmetry and pace of the patient gait, which is closer to the normal gait. In the future, soft exoskeleton robots are expected to bring better active rehabilitation effects and wearing experience for patients with gait disorders.