Anoop Rajappan

(presenting on November 5, 2025)

Smart, Self-Powered Wearable Robots for Assistance and Rehabilitation

Abstract

Wearable robotic devices provide critical assistance to people with disabilities and mobility limitations. Although current devices provide effective motion assistance, they often rely on rigid, heavy, and bulky components—such as motors, valves, electronics, batteries, and compressors—for actuation and control, burdening the user and impacting the comfort and portability of these devices. In this talk, we explore textile-based pneumatic wearables as a soft, lightweight, and durable technology for building comfortable assistive devices at low cost. As an alternative to electronic controllers, we develop a soft, fully textile platform for embedding pneumatic digital logic in wearables. Our textile-based logic gates enable logic computations, onboard memory storage, user interaction, and direct interfacing with pneumatic actuators. In addition, they are lightweight, made using scalable manufacturing techniques, and durable enough to withstand everyday use. Concurrently, we also address limitations in portable power delivery by developing “self-powered” wearables that harvest pneumatic energy from the motion of the human body without electricity. Finally, we explore future directions in soft robotic and textile-based intelligence that leverage the inherent mechanical properties of soft materials for realizing fluidic sensing and computation.

Speaker Bio

Anoop completed his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India and his master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After four years of postdoctoral research at Rice University, he joined the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics at Tulane University in July 2024. Anoop’s research at Tulane will aim to leverage fluidics and soft materials to enable future generations of smart robots and wearables, with a focus on developing safe, comfortable, and low-cost robotic devices for assisting people with disabilities.