Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments via Soft Robotic Unfurling

Authors: Nam Gyun Kim, William E. Heap, Yimeng Qin, Elvy B. Yao, Jee-Hwan Ryu, Allison M. Okamura · IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2025

Licences

Open Access
Paper: CC BY 4.0

Everything below draws on the full paper under its CC BY 4.0 licence; its figure is credited to the authors.

TL;DR

SWAG adds small inflatable vine robots to a garment so it unfurls over the limb from its tip, putting on a sleeve, jacket or trousers in 13-21 s with no fabric sliding on the skin.

Why it matters

The garment does the dressing itself, so there is no arm trajectory to plan and no vision-based motion planning: the body guides the unfurling path, even when the user's posture changes during dressing. For assistive-robotics builders it is a compliant, relatively low-cost alternative to manipulator-based dressing that can be embedded in ordinary jackets and trousers.

Problem

Robotic dressing aids mostly use rigid arms that pull conventional garments onto the body. These systems struggle with highly flexible fabric in continuous contact with the person, take a long time, need the user to hold a fixed posture, and depend on costly sensing and complex control, while their rigid structure raises safety concerns. No soft robot had been proposed for dressing with general garments.

Proposed solution

The Self-Wearing Adaptive Garment (SWAG) is a thin cylindrical sheath of TPU-coated ripstop nylon with welded channels, inside which small inflatable vine robots (subvines) grow from their tips. Each growing subvine pushes the distal end of the sheath, which unfurls over the limb like a garment turned inside out in reverse, so the fabric never slides on the skin. Only the subvines are pressurised, not the whole sheath, which keeps the garment compliant; a compact base station with a motor-driven reel retracts the subvines for repeated use.

Key insights

A tight garment comes off easily when turned inside out because it does not slide on the skin; SWAG runs this in reverse, unfurling the sheath from its tip so it covers the limb with minimal friction.
Pressurising only isolated subvines, not the whole sheath, is essential: an inflated slack sheath expands and kinks like a buckling vine robot instead of transmitting force to the tip.
Unfurling force follows Mg = N a/(a+b) (PA - f), so more subvines lower the pressure each needs, but they also raise bending stiffness and interference, so a small number is recommended.
With one or two subvines bending stiffness depends on the bending axis; for arms and legs with a known main bending axis, two subvines give good compliance without the asymmetric jamming seen with one.
Channels attached along a jacket can route the unfurling around direction changes, lifting the jacket and closing its front opening.

Main results

Fitted a/(a+b) values of 0.2313, 0.2678 and 0.2841 for one, two and three subvines; the two-subvine force slope is slightly more than twice the one-subvine slope, as the model predicts.
With three subvines in a 120 mm sheath, jamming lowered force below the model; widening the sheath to 170 mm removed jamming and the results matched the model.
The two-subvine SWAG passed through joint angles up to 120 degrees with peak pressure inside the fabric's tensile limits; its maximum torque equals lifting about 0.3 kg at the fingertips of a 30 cm forearm.
A sleeve covered a person's arm in 14 s at subvine pressures up to 50 kPa, across bent-arm postures, without precise alignment or manual help.
A jacket was donned in 13 s and trousers in 21 s using preloaded subvines built into the garments, without the base station.

Limitations

Shown only for a sleeve, jackets and trousers; extension to T-shirts, lab gowns and more complex dressing scenarios is left to future work (authors).
The sheath diameter is fixed; an adjustable sheath or elastic material is needed for a wider range of body types and movements (authors).
Garment loading is not automated and the user interface needs improvement (authors).
No clinical trials with people with mobility impairments yet, and doffing by reversing the unfurling has not been tested (authors).
Required pressure and its variation grow with joint angle because wrinkles at sharp bends change the unfurling force; at 90 and 120 degrees the subvine was seen to collapse.

Field impact

Winner of the RA-L 2026 RA-L Best Paper Award, with 3 citations so far. The paper gives the force model, design rules for the number of subvines, the materials (30-denier TPU-coated ripstop nylon) and the ultrasonic-welding build process; it does not link code or design files.

Abstract

Robotic dressing assistance has the potential to improve the quality of life for individuals with limited mobility. Existing solutions predominantly rely on rigid robotic manipulators, which have challenges in handling deformable garments and ensuring safe physical interaction with the human body. Prior robotic dressing methods require excessive operation times, complex control strategies, and constrained user postures, limiting their practicality and adaptability. This paper proposes a novel soft robotic dressing system, the Self-Wearing Adaptive Garment (SWAG), which uses an unfurling and growth mechanism to facilitate autonomous dressing. Unlike traditional approaches, the SWAG conforms to the human body through an unfurling-based deployment method, eliminating skin-garment friction and enabling a safer and more efficient dressing process. We present the working principles of the SWAG, introduce its design and fabrication, and demonstrate its performance in dressing assistance. The proposed system demonstrates effective garment application across various garment configurations, presenting a promising alternative to conventional robotic dressing assistance.

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