Shape Programmable and Multifunctional Soft Textile Muscles for Wearable and Soft Robotics

Textiles are promising candidates for use in soft robots and wearable devices due to their inherent compliance, high versatility, and skin comfort. Planar fluidic textile-based actuators exhibit low profile and high conformability, and can seamlessly integrate additional components (e.g., soft sensors or variable stiffness structures [VSSs]) to create advanced, multifunctional smart textile actuators. In this article, a new class of programmable, fluidic soft textile muscles (STMs) that incorporate multilayered silicone sheets with embedded fluidic channels is introduced. The STMs are scalable and fabricated by apparel engineering techniques, offering a fabrication approach able to create large-scaled multilayered structures that can be challenging for current microfluidic bonding methods. They are also highly automation compatible due to no manual insertion of elastic tubes/bladders into textile structures. Liquid metal is employed for creating fluidic channels. It is not only used for actuation but also used as channels for additional features such as soft piezoresistive sensors with enhanced sensitivity to STMs’ pressure-induced elongation, or VSSs of either low-melting-point alloys or a new thermo-responsive epoxy with low viscosity and transition temperature. The STMs hold promising prospects for soft robotic and wearable applications, which is demonstrated by an example of a textile-based wearable 3D skin-stretch haptic interface.