Computational Design of Wiring Layout on Tight Suits with Minimal Motion Resistance

TL;DR

This paper presents a topological optimization method for designing wiring layouts on tight suits that minimizes motion resistance, strain energy, and interference with human movement, verified through physical prototypes and user studies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deformation-weighted Steiner tree approach for wiring layout optimization on clothing surfaces, improving flexibility and reducing strain energy.

Findings

Reduced wire strain energy by 77% on average across tested actions.

Achieved 18% lower strain energy compared to expert-designed layouts.

Validated effectiveness through physical prototypes and user studies.

Abstract

An increasing number of electronics are directly embedded on the clothing to monitor human status (e.g., skeletal motion) or provide haptic feedback. A specific challenge to prototype and fabricate such a clothing is to design the wiring layout, while minimizing the intervention to human motion. We address this challenge by formulating the topological optimization problem on the clothing surface as a deformation-weighted Steiner tree problem on a 3D clothing mesh. Our method proposed an energy function for minimizing strain energy in the wiring area under different motions, regularized by its total length. We built the physical prototype to verify the effectiveness of our method and conducted user study with participants of both design experts and smart cloth users. On three types of commercial products of smart clothing, the optimized layout design reduced wire strain energy by an average of 77% among 248 actions compared to baseline design, and 18% over the expert design.