Texergy: Textile-based Harvesting, Storing, and Releasing of Mechanical Energy for Passive On-Body Actuation

Humans instinctively manipulate and "actuate" their clothing, for instance, to adapt to the environment or to modify aesthetics. However, such manual actuation remains inflexible and directly tied to user action. We introduce Texergy, a textile-based technical framework that decouples user input and actuated output to make passive on-body actuation interactive and programmable. Texergy achieves this by harvesting energy from user interactions with a set of input modules, storing it mechanically on the body in elastic materials, later releasing the energy on demand, and finally connecting to output end-effectors that realize the actuation. We present a fabrication approach based on almost entirely textile materials using laser-cutting and simple manual assembly to enable integration into clothing and easy prototyping. We report the results of technical experiments and provide a design tool to support customizing the actuation’s force and distance, type of harvesting, and deployment of Texergy mechanisms. We practically demonstrate the capabilities of Texergy with four applications, including a quick-release belt, a passive exosuit with dynamic assistance, a haptic feedback top powered by implicit user actions in VR, and a dance-driven shape-changing costume.