In the past few years, we have covered plenty of soft robotic wearables for gaming and healthcare. Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have come up with a rapid design and fabrication tool for creating soft pneumatic actuators.
PneuAct is based on a machine knitting process. It operates autonomously. Conductive yarn is used for sensing. The researchers used the actuators to build a robot that senses when it was touched. This approach can be used to make all kinds of assistive robots with integrated sensing.