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

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61975173), Major Scientific Research Project of Zhejiang Lab (No. 2019MC0AD01), and Key Research and Development Project of Zhejiang Province (No. 2021C05003), the CIE-Tencent Robotics X Rhino-Bird Focused Research Program (No. 2020-01-006).

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Author notes

  1. Shuqi Ma, Xiaoyu Wang and Pan Li have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Intelligent Sensing, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou, 310000, People’s Republic of China

    Shuqi Ma, Xiaoyu Wang, Ni Yao, Jianliang Xiao, Haitao Liu, Longteng Yu & Lei Zhang

  2. Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

    Pan Li & Guangming Tao

  3. State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, People’s Republic of China

    Zhang Zhang, Limin Tong & Lei Zhang

  4. Tencent Robotics X Lab, Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Shenzhen, 518054, People’s Republic of China

    Xiong Li

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  1. Shuqi Ma
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  2. Xiaoyu Wang
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Correspondence to Guangming Tao or Lei Zhang.

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Ma, S., Wang, X., Li, P. et al. Optical Micro/Nano Fibers Enabled Smart Textiles for Human–Machine Interface. Adv. Fiber Mater. 4, 1108–1117 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-022-00163-6

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