Two articles on textile-based wearable robotics written by researchers in mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice are featured in the July issue of the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.
An article by Daniel Preston, assistant professor of MECH, and students and former students in his Preston Innovation Laboratory, is featured on the inside front cover: “Sheet-Based Fluidic Diodes for Embedded Fluidic Circuitry in Soft Devices.”
Appearing on the inside back cover is “Multiscale Textile-Based Haptic Interactions,” co-authored by Marcia O’Malley, Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in MECH and department chair, Preston and their students.
“The appearance of these articles and selection for cover art features in a single issue of the journal speaks to the level of interest in the work coming out of our department on soft, wearable devices and robots. It’s exciting to be part of this collaborative effort across several research groups at Rice,” Preston said.
His lab has developed a soft fluidic diode made from flexible thermoplastic and textile sheets using a layered fabrication approach. The diode was selected for a cover art illustration in the July issue of Advanced Intelligent Systems and is an essential component in their sheet-based fluidic logic systems.
“It enables electronics-free control of soft devices and robots,” Preston said. “Fluidic circuits incorporating the diode provide capabilities including Boolean operations, encoding and rectification.”
Preston’s article is co-authored by Vi T. Vo ’23, second-year doctoral student at Boston University; Anoop Rajappan, MECH research scientist at Rice during the study and now a tenure-track
faculty member at Tulane University; Barclay Jumet and Marquise Bell, fifth-year graduate students in MECH at Rice; and Sofia Urbina, second-year doctoral student in MECH at Rice.
The article led by O’Malley’s group was co-authored by Zane A. Zook ’23 Ph.D., Senior Research Engineer at Oregon Health & Science University; Barclay Jumet; and Anas Yousaf, ’24, first-year doctoral student at UT-Austin; and Preston. The research featured on the inside back cover was conducted in Preston’s lab and in O’Malley’s Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab.
“Wearable haptic devices,” O’Malley said, “transmit information via touch receptors in the skin, but when devices are worn on parts of the body with high densities of receptors, such as the fingertips and hands, our ability to interact with the world around us is impeded. Other locations well-suited for wearables, such as the wrists and arms, suffer from lower perceptual sensitivity. Our multiscale approach leverages the best of both worlds by addressing the arm with notifications and allowing the user to explore the wearable in higher fidelity with the fingertips at their convenience.”
Textile-based wearable devices, she said, have introduced new techniques of fabrication that can address these constraints and enable new modes of haptic interactions.