Encoding Robotic Behavior Through Textile Architectures

Textiles—mechanical metamaterials created through interlacing or interlooping of effectively "1D" fibers and yarns—provide a powerful platform for encoding function directly through structure. Leveraging structure-function relationships defined by topology and geometry, these materials can be designed to sense, actuate, and even demonstrate forms of embodied intelligence. This paradigm enables fabrics to function as soft robotic materials. Such functional embodiment is especially promising in the context of wearable devices, where comfort, personalization, and scalable low-cost manufacturing demand robust strategies to integrate sensors, actuators, and interconnects. This seminar will explore how textile design principles and manufacturing methods can be harnessed to create robotic textiles, highlighting how topology and geometry becomes a means of programming function.