Optical Micro/Nano Fibers Enabled Smart Textiles for Human–Machine Interface

Wearable human–machine interface (HMI) is an advanced technology that has a wide range of applications from robotics to augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). In this study, an optically driven wearable human-interactive smart textile is proposed by integrating a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) patch embedded with optical micro/nanofibers (MNF) array with a piece of textiles. Enabled by the highly sensitive pressure dependent bending loss of MNF, the smart textile shows high sensitivity (65.5 kPa⁻¹) and fast response (25 ms) for touch sensing. Benefiting from the warp and weft structure of the textile, the optical smart textile can feel slight finger slip along the MNF. Furthermore, machine learning is utilized to classify the touch manners, achieving a recognition accuracy as high as 98.1%. As a proof-of-concept, a remote-control robotic hand and a smart interactive doll are demonstrated based on the optical smart textile. This optical smart textile represents an ideal HMI for AR/VR and robotics applications. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]