Electroactive textile actuators for wearable and soft robots

Abstract

Smart fabrics offer the potential for a new generation of soft robotics, reactive clothing and wearable technologies through the fusion of smart materials, textiles and electrical circuitry. In this work we present a range of smart fabrics and reactive textiles for soft robotics. We investigate conductive stretchable textiles for the fabrication of dielectric elastomer (DE) and electroadhesive (EA) actuators. These include a planar DE actuator, a bending DE actuator, and an EA actuator. The textile DE actuator generated a relative area expansion of 16.4 % under 9 kV while the bending actuator generated a relative expansion of 5 % under 6 kV. The EA actuator generated a shear adhesive force of 0.14 kPa at less than 5 kV. This work shows the feasibility of using conductive fabrics for soft actuation technologies. Conductive textiles have the potential to deliver simple, comfortable, multi-function and wearable soft robotic devices and complete soft robots.