A team has made a shiny black jacket that performs logic—without electronics. Via WIREDUK
The jacket falls under the category of “soft robots,” which are automated, programmable machines made of flexible materials such as rubber, silicone, or fabric. In recent years, researchers have begun designing soft robots to potentially work alongside humans. They generally move with less precision than their hard metal counterparts, but they have a gentler touch. “If you’re working and a [hard] robot hits you, you go to the hospital if you’re lucky,” says Wehner.
In addition, a fabric computer is more resilient than a semiconductor-based one. To test the jacket’s robustness, the team placed a component made of several fabric pouches in a mesh bag and ran it through a washing machine 20 times. They also ran it over with a 2002 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck—scenarios “you might expect a traditional piece of clothing to encounter at some of the extremes in its lifetime,” says Preston. The pouches still worked. Imagine doing that to an Apple Watch.
While the jacket is largely a demonstration of the feasibility of clothing-based logic, the team also imagines it could aid people with disabilities who have difficulty raising or lowering a hood. In addition to the jacket, they made a shirt that can help someone lift their arm at the shoulder joint. The shirt contains air pouches on the torso that pump an accordion-like bellows under the arm.
But the team hopes to scale up later. Preston says they are in the early stages of forming a company to make the technology available to consumers. They would also like to test the safety of these garments in clinical trials so that people can use them in medical settings.
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