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Soft actuators (SAs) have been used in many compliant robotic structure and wearable devices, due to their safe interaction with the wearers. Despite advances, the capability of current SAs is limited by scalability, high hysteresis, and slow responses. In this paper, a new class of soft, scalable, and high-aspect ratio fiber-reinforced hydraulic SAs is introduced. The new SA uses a simple fabrication process of insertion where a hollow elastic rubber tube is directly inserted into a constrained hollow coil, eliminating the need for the manual wrapping of an inextensible fiber around a long elastic structure. To provide high adaptation to the user skin for wearable applications, the new SAs are integrated into flexible fabrics to form a wearable fabric sleeve. To monitor the SA elongation, a soft liquid metal-based fabric piezoresistive sensor is also developed. To capture the nonlinear hysteresis of the SA, a novel asymmetric hysteresis model which only requires five model parameters in its structure is developed and experimentally validated. The new SAs-driven wearable robotic sleeve is scalable, highly flexible, and lightweight. It can also produce a large amount of force of around 23 N per muscle at around 30% elongation, to provide useful assistance to the human upper limbs. Experimental results show that the soft fabric sleeve can augment a user’s performance when working against a load, evidenced by a significant reduction on the muscular effort, as monitored by electromyogram (EMG) signals. The performance of the developed SAs, soft fabric sleeve, soft liquid metal fabric sensor, and nonlinear hysteresis model reveal that they can effectively modulate the level of assistance for the wearer. The new technologies obtained from this work can be potentially implemented in emerging assistive applications, such as rehabilitation, defense, and industry.

A Wearable Soft Fabric Sleeve for Upper Limb Augmentation