FaBrick: An actuated fabric building platform for constructing scalable and versatile soft robots

Soft robots have shown promise across applications such as wearable assistance, gripping, manipulation, and locomotion, where adaptability, safety, and compliance are essential. These functions are largely enabled by a small set of fundamental actuation modes: contraction, bending, twisting, rotation, and stiffening; but existing soft actuators that realize these motions are constructed using distinct materials and fabrication methods. This lack of standardization fragments the design process, limits scalability, and restricts accessibility for nonspecialized users. To address these challenges, this paper introduces FaBrick, a modular actuated fabric material made through a scalable manufacturing process that uses heated, patterned rolling to produce it at arbitrary lengths. Through folding, cutting, sealing, and stapling, FaBrick material can be configured to replicate the contractile, twisting, rotational, and bending motions of other soft pneumatic actuators. Each actuator type is fabricated, modeled, and experimentally validated, and the actuators are integrated into (i) wearable robotic limbs, (ii) a one-piece adaptive gripper, (iii) an elephant trunk-inspired manipulator, and (iv) a quadruped-like locomotion robot. Together, these results establish FaBrick as a scalable, versatile, and user-friendly foundation for building integrated soft robotic systems from a single material platform.