  Robotic bathing assistance has long been considered an important and
practical task in healthcare. Yet, achieving flexible and efficient cleaning
tasks on the human body is challenging, since washing the body involves direct
human-robot physical contact and simple, safe, and effective devices are needed
for bathing and hygiene. In this paper, we present a meso-scale wearable robot
that can locomote along the human body to provide bathing and skin care
assistance. We evaluated the cleaning performance of the robot system under
different scenarios. The experiments on the pipe show that the robot can
achieve cleaning percentage over 92% with two types of stretchable fabrics. The
robot removed most of the debris with average values of 94% on a human arm and
93% on a manikin torso. The results demonstrate that the robot exhibits high
performance in cleaning tasks.
