A Wearable Glove with Electrothermal-Controlled Ionogels for Adhesive Gripping

In this article, a lightweight, untethered wearable adhesive glove (total weight 72 g) is developed to empower the human hand with adhesive gripping. A textile glove comprises ionogels with embedded flexible heaters and a wireless electronic control module. The thermoresponsive ionogel with switchable adhesion achieves a switching ratio of 4.9 after heating 4.4 s under 4 V voltage, enabling on-demand object pickup and release. As demonstration examples, the wearable adhesive glove is shown to grasp multiple objects with single-finger adhesion and manipulate card with two-finger adhesion. It is shown in the experiments that the wearable adhesive glove can expand the gripping modes and enhance the gripping ability of the human hand by giving it a new degree of freedom of adhesion.