Wearable robots are edging closer to the kind of smart body armour seen in superhero films, such as the powered suit worn by Iron Man. Researchers have developed an automated weaving system that can continuously produce thin fabric muscle for flexible, clothing-type robots.
The material, strong enough to lift up to 15kg while weighing 10g, marks a significant step toward wearable robotic suits that can assist with movement, rehabilitation, and industrial work.
The system uses shape memory alloy (SMA) wire with a diameter of 25μm, about one-fourth the thickness of a human hair, processed into coil-shaped yarn. This aims to enable the continuous mass production of lightweight yet powerful artificial muscle actuators.
The technology was developed by a team at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) Advanced Robotics Research Center, under the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST), led by Principal Researcher Cheol Hoon Park.
The fabric is designed as an ideal core actuator for clothing-type wearable robots. The SMA coil yarn previously developed by KIMM used a metallic core wire, which resulted in low elongation and made automatic weaving difficult. To overcome this limitation, the KIMM research team replaced the metal core with natural fibre, redesigned the structure and fabrication process of the fabric muscle, and improved the weaving machine’s design, thereby achieving stable and continuous mass production.
Conventional wearable robots designed to assist multiple joints, such as the elbow, shoulder, and waist, relied on heavy, noisy motor or pneumatic actuators. This made them bulky, expensive, and uncomfortable for long-term use. As a result, most could provide only limited support to specific joints.
Active assistance for the shoulder has been particularly challenging due to its complex range of motion. In contrast, KIMM’s fabric muscle actuators are lightweight and flexible, allowing them to naturally conform to and actively assist multiple complex joints simultaneously.
Using this technology, the research team developed the clothing-type wearable robot, weighing less than 2kg, that simultaneously assists the elbow, shoulder and waist. The team says the technology can reduce muscle effort by more than 40% during repetitive physical tasks.
The team created a shoulder-assist robot that weighs 840g. It is designed to help patients with muscle weakness to wear in daily life. According to clinical trials conducted at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) on patients with muscular weakness, including those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the wearable shoulder-assist robot improved shoulder movement range by more than 57%.
With the ability to continuously produce high-quality, uniform fabric muscle through the automated weaving system, the research team says it has laid the foundation for the commercialisation of clothing-type wearable robots.
This is expected to reduce workers’ physical strain, improve patients’ quality of life, and accelerate the widespread adoption of wearable robots, thereby enhancing industrial competitiveness. In particular, the shoulder-assist robot, designed to support rehabilitation and daily activities of patients with muscle weakness, is expected to reduce caregiver burden while improving patient independence, quality of life, and self-esteem, and overall well-being.
“Our development of continuous mass-production technology for fabric muscle – the key component of clothing-type wearable robots – will significantly improve quality of life in fields such as healthcare, logistics, and construction,” says Dr Cheol Hoon Park, principal researcher at the KIMM Advanced Robotics Research Center.
“We will continue to build on KIMM’s extensive wearable robotics technologies to accelerate commercialisation and lead the global wearable robotics market.”
The research, which won the KIMM the Best Research Award 2024, was supported by KIMM’s ACE program, the Core Robot Technology Development Program of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources, and the Seoul National University Hospital Lee Kun-hee Child Cancer and Rare Disease Project. The findings were published online in the October 2025 issue of TNSRE (IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering), an international journal in the field of rehabilitation engineering.
* Read the full findings here.