# Fabric Soft Poly-Limbs for Physical Assistance of Daily Living Tasks

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a soft, fabric-based wearable robotic limb that provides physical assistance for daily tasks, featuring systematic design rules, validated performance, and practical demonstrations of manipulation and load-carrying capabilities.

## Contribution

The work presents a novel fabric soft poly-limb with systematic design guidelines, validated performance, and practical integration for wearable assistance.

## Key findings

- Can safely carry loads 10.1 times its body weight
- Demonstrates effective manipulation and load-carrying in experiments
- Design rules enable highly compliant soft robotic limbs

## Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of a highly articulated, continuum, wearable, fabric-based Soft Poly-Limb (fSPL). This fabric soft arm acts as an additional limb that provides the wearer with mobile manipulation assistance through the use of soft actuators made with high-strength inflatable fabrics. In this work, a set of systematic design rules is presented for the creation of highly compliant soft robotic limbs through an understanding of the fabric based components behavior as a function of input pressure. These design rules are generated by investigating a range of parameters through computational finite-element method (FEM) models focusing on the fSPL's articulation capabilities and payload capacity in 3D space. The theoretical motion and payload outputs of the fSPL and its components are experimentally validated as well as additional evaluations verify its capability to safely carry loads 10.1x its body weight, by wrapping around the object. Finally, we demonstrate how the fully collapsible fSPL can comfortably be stored in a soft-waist belt and interact with the wearer through spatial mobility and preliminary pick-and-place control experiments.