Abstract
Smart fabrics offer the potential for a new generation of soft robotics and wearable technologies through the fusion of smart materials, textiles and electrical circuitries. Conductive and stretchable textiles have inherent compliance and low resistance that are suitable for driving artificial muscle actuators and are potentially safer electrode materials for soft actuation technologies. We demonstrate how soft electroactive actuating structures can be designed and fabricated from conducting textiles. We first quantitatively analyse a range of stretchable conductive textiles for dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). We found that conductive-knit textiles are more suitable for unidirectional DEA applications due to the largest difference (150%) in principle strain axes, whereas isotropic textiles are more suited to bidirectional DEA applications due to the smallest (11.1%) principle strain difference. Finally, we demonstrate controllable breathability through a planar e-textile DEA-driven skin and show thermal regulation in a wearable prototype that exploits soft actuation and kirigami.
Highlights
Conventional robots are predominantly made of rigid structural materials such as metals or plastics [1,2]
We found that different textiles had different dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs)
Conductive are moreare comfortable electrode carcinogenic grease and nano-particle electrodes, low cost and readily materials available. than. They potentially yield the opportunity grease nano-particle electrodes, low devices, cost andand readily. They yield to carbon develop simple,and comfortable and wearable softare robotic complete soft robots
Summary
Conventional robots are predominantly made of rigid structural materials such as metals or plastics [1,2]. In contrast, are made of intrinsically soft and stretchable materials such as gels and elastomers, and are formed into compliant active mechanisms and structures [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] They are, able to offer safer and more robust interactions with humans and natural environments. Used a low cost two-dimensional (2D) desktop material cutter to fabricate textile electrodes for simple soft DEA and electroadhesive (EA) actuators. In [20], Allen et al compared two conductive textiles and used them (using a laser cutter to cut the electrodes) in a variable stiffness DEA device Both studies manifest that conductive and stretchable textiles have the potential to enable simple, comfortable and wearable soft robotic devices and complete robots.
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