The robot automatically dresses people in 10 seconds
"While cycling, it started to rain and I thought it would be useful if the raincoat could automatically cover itself," Kim Nam Gyun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and lead author of the study, told Reuters.
He explained, the vine-like robot system follows and dresses the user by turning the clothes over while moving. The time to wear a complete outfit is about 10 seconds.
The robot is flexible, flexible, operated by air pressure, integrated into the suit. As pressure increases, they pull the fabric up against the wearer's body, like climbing ivy up a structure, even when the person is not standing still.
Similar to ivy, the robot moves by reaching out at the tip instead of moving its entire body, thereby climbing stably along curved surfaces. "It can pass through narrow gaps, both reaching out and adapting to the shape of the surrounding environment, moving regardless of whether the surface is slippery, sticky or steep," said Ryu Jee-Hwan, professor of civil and environmental engineering at KAIST.
The research team, including experts from KAIST and Stanford University (USA), believes that the new technology has great potential because it does not require complex control algorithms and does not require the wearer to stand motionless. In addition to supporting the elderly and disabled, the robot system can be applied in situations where it is necessary to quickly put on and take off clothes without using hands, such as employees working in chip manufacturing clean rooms or emergency service workers who need personal protective equipment.
The American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters magazine awarded the autonomous clothing technology an Outstanding Research Award in June. The award is given annually to select research that demonstrates outstanding scientific contribution, technical originality, experimental rigor and future influence. This year, only 5 studies were selected from more than 1,700 studies published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2025.