Traditional ways to drive the motion of textiles have relied on power-efficient actuators such as nitinol alloys. Despite sufficient forces, these actuators must be small enough to be integrated into the fabric through crouching, sewing, weaving, or knitting. While pneumatic actuators that are reinforced by strain-limiting elements, namely, bellows or fibers with high tensile strength and low elongation, can provide sufficient forces and complex deformation, their bulkiness has yet rendered them “fiber-like.”
Here, I fabricate small-scale soft pneumatic actuators that can be seamlessly integrated into the knit fabric.