FibeRobo
A Novel Liquid-Crystal Elastomer Fiber for Shape-Shifting Fabrics
FibeRobo is a novel body-temperature shape-changing fiber based on liquid crystal elastomers. The development of a new fabrication technique and chemical composition of the fiber enables self-reversing morphing at, or optionally slightly above, body temperature. These fibers, once formed into the larger textile structure through knitting, weaving, and sewing techniques, enables a myriad of applications from medical devices (compressions shirts), athletic wear (self-ventilating clothing), to interactive eating experiences (morphing table cloths), and transforming fashion pieces.
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Team: Jack Forman, Ozgun Kilic Afsar, Sarah Nicita, Rosalie Lin, Liu Yang, Megan Hofmann, Akshay Kothakonda, Zachary Gordon, Cedric Honnet, Kristen Dorsey, Neil Gershenfeld, Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab & Center of Bits and Atoms
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Paper: UIST 2023 DOI
Motivation
By blending textiles’ softness and flexibility with actuators’ morphing capabilities, these interfaces offer a novel approach to designing interactive systems that can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives. However, creating complex fabric interfaces often requires new processes that are signifcantly different and incompatible with the standard approaches used to knit and weave fabrics. For example, many approaches to creating interactive fabrics require either: embedded hard components that diminish the affordances of cloth, complex digital design tools for implementation, or require unintuitive manipulations of fabric. While these methods can produce unique fabric interfaces, they are estranged from traditional textile fabrication and machinery. Instead, we propose that creating a fiber that could be purchased as a raw material and is compatible with unmodified fabric machinery affords users the benefits of well-developed textile workflows while minimizing the approach-specifc know-how and equipment.
Overview of the fiber fabrication process
Overview of the fber fabrication process. First, a viscous resin is extruded, stretched, and cured with UV light. Then the fber is dipped in oil, and the UV curing is completed as the fiber ascends to the final collection spool.
(Credit: Jack Forman)
Variation of fiber diameter
FibeRobo with diferent diameters of 0.5 mm, 1 mm, and 2.0 mm (bottom to top) plied with conductive wire. (Credit: Jack Forman)
Fiber-textile integration through machine embroidery
Embroidery with FibeRobo allows us to augment existing textiles with morphing motifs. Through careful design of the stitch density and patterns, fabric choices, we can construct different morphing primitives.
Staggered stitches lead to different folding angles
Due to the contraction limitations of the fiber, we developed staggered stitching patterns to enhance the folding angles. Reducing overlap among the fiber stitches allows for achieving larger angles.
FibeRobo integrated with heating elements
we explored the machine embroidery integration of LCE fber and conductive thread. This implementation used LCE fibers and conductive thread as the bobbin thread because of the LCE elasticity and conductive thread stiffness. As a result, this is a two-step process where the LCE fber is first loaded into the bobbin and embroidered with a Brother SE500 machine. We then repeat the embroidery with a conductive thread (silver-coated polyamide, AGSIS) bobbin. The conductive thread was used instead of litz wire as the litz wire tended to jam the machine. We used a cotton thread as the top thread for both.
FibeRoGlow: Dynamic Lamp
In this application, we demonstrate FibeRobo’s responsiveness to ambient heat sources and compatibility with embroidery machines. The self-reversing actuation shown in takes ∼5 minutes in each direction. While this actuation is relatively slow, this demo shows that FibeRobo does not require direct coupling with a heating element for controllable actuation. Light, or infrared heating, are two potential modes of remotely controlled actuation.
