Developed by an interdisciplinary team at MIT, FibeRobo is a novel thermally-actuated liquid crystal elastomer fiber conceived to revolutionize how textiles interact with their environment and users. This innovative fiber is designed to be embedded within fabrics, enabling them to silently change shape in response to temperature variations or electricity without bulky motors.

FibeRobo boasts an ability for rapid, significant displacement actuation (40-50% contraction). This feature allows textiles to react swiftly and noticeably when heated with electricity or in response to changes in body temperature. Importantly, the fiber re-elongates when cooled and can be cycled hundreds of times. Secondly, FibeRobo's fabrication process is reproducible, scalable, and low-cost, ensuring that it can be integrated into existing textile manufacturing and fashion pipelines with minimal disruption. Beyond the development of the fiber, we also developed four functional prototypes.
The first application demonstrated, FurbeRobo, is a dynamic dog compression vest (for my dog named Professor, who comes with me to the lab) designed to alleviate separation anxiety through remote-controlled hugs. This vest integrates FibeRobo with a heating element to apply gentle pressure on Professor's torso, mimicking the calming effect of a hug. Unlike traditional compression garments, FurbeRobo is lightweight, quiet, and resembles regular fabric, ensuring comfort. It features Bluetooth connectivity, allowing me to activate the vest remotely and comfort Professor from afar. This innovation represents a significant step forward in creating affective, digitally controlled pet wearables.
The second application, ShadeRobo, is a silent, shape-changing curtain that dynamically adjusts its position in response to thermal stimuli. In its default state, ShadeRobo serves as a conventional curtain, providing window coverage. However, when activated by a current that heats the fabric, ShadeRobo silently contracts, pulling the curtain upward to reveal the window beneath.

The third application, FibeRoGlow, is a dynamic blooming lamp that showcases FibeRobo's responsiveness to ambient heat sources and compatibility with embroidery machines. This lamp exemplifies the potential of our technology for aesthetic applications by incorporating 'livingness' into everyday objects. When the lamp is turned on, the heat generated causes the FibeRobo fibers to contract, lifting the lamp's petals and mimicking the natural opening of a flower.

The last application, FibeRoBra, is an adaptive sports bra that automatically adjusts support based on physical activity intensity. As body temperature rises with exercise, the bra tightens for increased support, and as the wearer cools down, it loosens for comfort. This innovation eliminates the need for multiple bras for different activities. Through our synthesizing of a body-temperature responsive fiber, it operates without external power, sensors, or hardware, making it as easy to wear, wash, and care for as traditional textiles.

In summary, FibeRobo stands at the intersection of science, technology, and art, offering a glimpse into a future where textiles are not merely passive elements of design but active participants in our daily lives. With FibeRobo, the fabric of the future is not just wearable; it's interactive, responsive, and endlessly adaptable.

MIT News Video: https://youtu.be/BLXu9fIfZzk?si=m1DvNN3x6lX2J0e5

UIST Paper PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3586183.3606732

For years, many people have been captivated by the potential of shape-shifting fabrics; however, no soft, robust, and self-reversing fiber actuator has been able to fulfill this vision. FibeRobo addresses this need by introducing a low-cost liquid crystal elastomer fiber with three defining features. First, FibeRobo is capable of rapid thermal self-reversing actuation with large displacements (~40%). Second, we make FibeRobo with a reproducible UV fiber drawing setup we designed and built ourselves. The machine allows us to produce hundreds of meters of long, strong, and even fiber with a sub-millimeter diameter. Third, FibeRobo is fully compatible with textile manufacturing machinery such as weaving looms, embroidery machines, and knitting machines.

The fiber used in this project is far from an off-the-shelf material and required an interdisciplinary team and two years of effort to fluently transverse the domains of fiber synthesis (materials science), building the open-source fiber drawing machine (mechanical engineering), knitting and weaving these fibers into structures with interesting morphing behaviors (textile design), and implementing digital wireless control (embedded electronics). By altering the resin composition, we can lower the actuation temperature to be around body temperature, meaning the heat generated from a hard workout would be enough to actuate the fabrics without electricity - allowing vents to open in the garment or for the sleeves to shorten.

While the fiber is humble in appearance and cost, the ability to reversibly and reliably reprogram the shape of fabrics opens up an exciting realm of possibilities for interaction design, medical devices, and dynamic architectures. To showcase these possibilities, we build a series of 4 applications. The first is a body-temperature responsive bra that tightens during a workout to provide extra support. The second is an embroidered lampshade that blooms when a person turns on the lamp. The third is a silent morphing curtain that can reversibly and quietly retract itself. The final is a dynamic compression vest for my dog. When my dog barks, I can press a button on my phone, which connects to the vest over a web server and causes the vest to gently constrict around her, providing a calming hug from afar akin to a thunder vest. The reception after the announcement of this project has been overwhelming and exciting. Over 17 different potential industrial collaborations (including LuluLemon, Iris Van Herpen, Loro Piana, etc.) have contacted me, a video on the work has received over 10M views in 48 hours, and the work has also been covered on MIT News, Popular Science, Interesting Engineering, and more.

Moving forward, we are actively working to scale the fiber and fabric production with industrial machinery. As a first step, this will allow us to make human-sized garments with programmable shape changes. In the future, we envision FibeRobo can reduce textile waste by creating versatile garments that can reconfigure their warmth and aesthetics across events and seasons - allowing one coat to be as functional as five coats without five times the material consumption.