They need a drone to go and pick these dropped items. How much fun that would be!
It seems like it would be "relatively" simple, and useful for basic tasks that don't need a full human.
I mean, now that you mention it, it really seems like that ought to be a thing, and that this would be a perfect use case for it. (Visual inspection of the ISS exterior would be another.)
Technically: yes.
Practically: it's so expensive to launch anything, much less a cleanup-bot, that it basically isn't done outside of research. This will probably change, but costs are unavoidably high so it'll probably always be rare.
There's a decent summary of the area in this, from a quick googling: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/tech/space-junk-robot-esa-int...
For small near-station use: I'm not sure! Some uses would certainly make sense, but I would be willing to bet that the risk of it going slightly too fast and damaging something makes it undesirable. It'll probably happen eventually, but I'd be a bit surprised if it is already a thing - most that I've seen have been armed machines that "walk" around the surface by grabbing things, which is much slower and safer.
Also its propulsion gas could also setup oscillations in the station itself. So a lot of math would have to go into counteract this little bee flying around outside the station.
ISS is in a rather low orbit, it requires quite a bit of upkeep (ha) to stay in space due to the tiny bit of atmospheric drag: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9482/how-long-woul...
That's true for everything else near that orbit, so the tool bag will probably burn up (well, re-enter anyway) in the atmosphere within a year or two, and be a complete non-issue after the next boost takes it to a permanently-different orbit.
Please, for this application you should use the term, "gripping hand".
To be more substantive: now you mention it I haven't heard of such a device and I also wonder why. Makes sense for inspection (but how much happens?) though retrieving lost tools sound quite difficult.
And though difficult, it seems like something worth becoming good at. Seems like a 1U might be big enough to hold a small drone and some things to retrieve. However you'd have to design your experiment carefully so that something you failed to retrieve would rather soon reenter the atmosphere and not become dangerous orbiting junk. I don't know how easy this would be: what if the drone tried to grab it and added a non-normal (i.e. sideways) component that put the target on a potentially destructive trajectory?
To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.
>Visual inspection of the ISS exterior
Yes, minus the gripping hand. [0]
"The sphere, which looks like an oversized soccer ball, was released by Mission Specialist Winston E. Scott during the STS-87 spacewalk and flew freely in the forward cargo bay for about 30 minutes."
But going with a humanoid form factor made it overlay ambitious and all that complexity prevented it from being useful for the kinds of basic teleop + grab tasks you're envisioning.
That's why the Canadarm handles inspection/gripping work. Much less risky to have a migrating robotic arm.