EFRI C3 SoRo: Textile Robotics: Integrative Design, Modeling, Manufacture, and Control of Soft Human-Interactive Apparel

该项目旨在利用纺织材料来制造柔软柔顺的可穿戴机器人，这些机器人重量轻，不受限制，可以提供有价值的帮助。这将通过研究如何建模、制造和控制基于纺织品的机器人系统来实现。该项目的成果将突出纺织品作为新组件的材料平台的好处，这些组件可以使可穿戴机器人系统像衣服一样穿着。当人们遭受神经和肌肉骨骼损伤时，他们往往不能进行甚至最简单的日常生活活动。该项目产生的创新设备和系统将通过向佩戴者的肢体施加力量来提供额外的力量，以减轻残疾并增强人体的自然能力。这将同时为独立、社会参与和重返工作岗位开辟道路，同时降低医疗成本。该项目还将促进跨学科的研究和教学，促进机器人专家、应用数学家、计算机科学家、生物医学工程师、材料科学家和功能服装设计师之间的互动。该项目将创建、分析和评估一类新型的基于纺织品的、适形的、可穿戴的服装机器人。嵌入式纺织应变和压力传感器将监测执行器和底层肢体的状态，而集成的不透气和导电流体动力和数据传输通道将通过同时在线估计和控制来操纵肢体。这个变革性的跨学科研究项目将解决一些基本问题，旨在提高我们对如何利用先进纺织材料的机械和电气特性来实现基于纺织的机器人的柔性和分布式驱动、传感和信息/电力传输的理解。该项目将开发新的计算和分析建模工具，考虑固有的材料和几何非线性，以指导单个致动器、传感器及其在肢体上的分布的参数化设计；基于模型和数据驱动的控制和估计算法，这些算法考虑了非线性执行器特性和基于纺织品的机器人在肢体上定位的固有不确定性，以及最终从纳米尺度到可穿戴服装的新型材料结构及其制造过程。该项目将通过高度协作的互动整合研究所有阶段的活动，并通过多个实验测试平台演示和验证该方法的好处。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project seeks to leverage textile materials to create soft and compliant wearable robots that are lightweight and nonrestrictive, and can deliver valuable levels of assistance. This will be achieved by studying how to model, manufacture and control textile-based robotic systems. The outcomes from this project will highlight the benefits of textiles as a materials platform for new components that enable wearable robot systems that can be worn like clothing. When people suffer neurologic and musculoskeletal injuries, they often cannot perform even the simplest activities of daily life. The innovative new devices and systems that result from this project will offer the potential to provide additional strength by applying forces to a wearer's limb to mitigate disability and augment the natural abilities of the human body. This will simultaneously open avenues for independence, societal participation, and return-to-work, while reducing healthcare costs. This project will also promote interdisciplinary research and teaching, and facilitate interactions between roboticists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists, biomedical engineers, material scientists, and functional apparel designers. This project will create, analyze, and evaluate a new class of textile-based, conformal, and compliant wearable robots in the form of garments. Embedded textile strain and pressure sensors will monitor the state of the actuators and the underlying limb, while integrated air-impermeable and conductive pathways for fluid power and data transfer will enable manipulation of the limb through simultaneous online estimation and control. This transformative, interdisciplinary research program will address fundamental questions aimed at increasing our understanding of how to leverage the mechanical and electrical properties of advanced textile materials to achieve flexible and distributed actuation, sensing, and information/power transfer for textile-based robots. The project will develop new computational and analytical modeling tools that account for the inherent material and geometric nonlinearities to guide the parametric design of both individual actuators, sensors and their distributions on a limb; model-based and data-driven control and estimation algorithms that account for the nonlinear actuator properties and inherent uncertainty in positioning a textile-based robot on a limb and finally novel material constructions and their manufacturing processes spanning the nanoscale to wearable garments. This project will integrate the activities at all stages of the research through highly collaborative interactions and demonstrate and validate the benefits of this approach through multiple experimental testbeds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.