Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments via Soft Robotic Unfurling

Robotic dressing assistance has the potential to improve the quality of life for individuals with limited mobility. Existing solutions predominantly rely on rigid robotic manipulators, which have challenges in handling deformable garments and ensuring safe physical interaction with the human body. Prior robotic dressing methods require excessive operation times, complex control strategies, and constrained user postures, limiting their practicality and adaptability. This paper proposes a novel soft robotic dressing system, the Self-Wearing Adaptive Garment (SWAG), which uses an unfurling and growth mechanism to facilitate autonomous dressing. Unlike traditional approaches,the SWAG conforms to the human body through an unfurling based deployment method, eliminating skin-garment friction and enabling a safer and more efficient dressing process. We present the working principles of the SWAG, introduce its design and fabrication, and demonstrate its performance in dressing assistance. The proposed system demonstrates effective garment application across various garment configurations, presenting a promising alternative to conventional robotic dressing assistance.

External Steering of Vine Robots via Magnetic Actuation

This paper explores the concept of external magnetic control for vine robots to enable their high curvature steering and navigation for use in endoluminal applications. Vine robots, inspired by natural growth and locomotion strategies, present unique shape adaptation capabilities that allow passive deformation around obstacles. However, without additional steering mechanisms, they lack the ability to actively select the desired direction of growth. The principles of magnetically steered growing robots are discussed, and experimental results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed magnetic actuation approach. We present a 25 mm diameter vine robot with integrated magnetic tip capsule, including 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) localization and camera and demonstrate a minimum bending radius of 3.85 cm with an internal pressure of 30 kPa. Furthermore, we evaluate the robot's ability to form tight curvature through complex navigation tasks, with magnetic actuation allowing for extended free-space navigation without buckling. The suspension of the magnetic tip was also validated using the 6 DOF localization system to ensure that the shear-free nature of vine robots was preserved. Additionally, by exploiting the magnetic wrench at the tip, we showcase preliminary results of vine retraction. The findings contribute to the development of controllable vine robots for endoluminal applications, providing high tip force and shear-free navigation.