FibeRobo, a Low-Cost Shape-Shifting Smart Fiber, Wants to Make Future Clothing Truly Smart

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northeastern University want to make your clothing truly smart — using a shape-shifting fiber dubbed FibeRobo.

"We use textiles for everything. We make planes with fiber-reinforced composites, we cover the International Space Station with a radiation-shielding fabric, we use them for personal expression and performance wear," says lead author Jack Forman by way of background to the team's research. "So much of our environment is adaptive and responsive, but the one thing that needs to be the most adaptive and responsive — textiles — is completely inert."

That's what Forman and colleagues have aimed to solve, by turning inert fabric into a responsive shape-shifting platform for customization. Using adding liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) to a rubber-like elastomer network, the researchers did exactly that: when the fabric is heated, the crystal molecules shift back to liquid and the fiber contracts; when it cools again, the LCE recrystallizes and the fiber returns to its original length.

The prototype fibre was built using a custom fabrication machine itself built using 3D-printed and laser-cut parts coupled with what Forman describes as "basic electronics." The machine heats the LCE resin and squeezes it through a nozzle, then cures it with ultraviolet lights.

The resulting fiber is then dipped in oil and re-cured, then powdered and spooled ready for use in commercial textile fabrication machines — a process which, start to finish, currently takes about a day to produce around 3,280 feet of fiber.

The material, FibeRobo, is claimed to contract by up to 40 percent without bending and at temperatures safe for human skin. It's also cheap: the fiber can be produced for around 20 cents per 3.28 feet, one-sixtieth the cost of commercially-available shape-shifting fibers.

It's suitable for use with industrial sewing and knitting machines, or can be worked by hand — and to prove its capabilities the team built a series of FibeRobo-based wearables, including a Bluetooth-triggered compression jacket designed to calm dogs and a sports bra which tightens during exercise.

The team's work has been published under closed-access terms in the Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '23); more information is available under open-access terms on the MIT Media Lab project page.

Main article image courtesy of Jack Forman.