Automation in textile industry.How can it change the way we buy clothes?

15 Jul 2018 POSTED BY Vaishnavi Chidambaram

The last time a piece of technology significantly overhauled the textile industry, it was 1842 with the invention of the sewing machine. Today, robots can handle parts of the garment-making process–cutting fabric, for instance–but human hands are still needed to feed fabric into sewing machines.

That’s what the web developer and inventor Jonathan Zornow wants to change. He has created a system called Sewbo, which, he claims, is responsible for the first instance of a robot sewing a T-shirt. Sewbo is designed to solve one of the biggest barriers to automating garment manufacturing. According to Howie Choset, a professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, robots are bad at handling soft, flexible fabric–which is why industries that use hard materials, like cars and electronics, are light years ahead in automation.

Sewbo takes a cue from established robot counterparts. It works by using a water-soluble thermoplastic to stiffen fabric to be as sturdy as cardboard, which can then be manipulated by an off-the-shelf universal robot and fed into a sewing machine. Once the seams are stitched, the stiffened garment is put into hot water, where the plastic melts off and the shirt emerges in its soft, finished state.

In textiles, as in many global industries, automation is the holy grail. So says Eric Spackey, CEO of Bluewater Defense, an apparel manufacturer for the U.S. Department of Defense. Spackey’s factory in Puerto Rico produces 80,000 trousers a month with 523 people (each combat trouser, which has 64 separate pieces, takes about 45 minutes to make). While Bluewater Defense has automated as much as is possible, it still relies on manual labor for much of the sewing. And Bluewater is no exception. Today, clothes must still be hand-fed into a sewing machine.

Because of labor costs, many companies have moved manufacturing overseas to Asia, where workers may be paid very little to sew in dangerous conditions. Automation has the potential to change that, Spackey says. He believes full automation is coming to the garment industry in the next 5 to 10 years. “If we can make it happen where we can develop machines that can actually take woven fabric that’s cut in parts and sew it into clothing, manufacturing is going to move back to the U.S.,” he says.

Whether or not that’s the case, automation is the future, and other startups are working on it. Kniterate, which was founded several years ago, is trying to knit together ready-to-wear garments–almost like 3D printing of fabric, with no sewing needed. Fabrican uses a “spray-on fabric,” where a chemical is applied directly to the body to create a garment that molds to any individual’s physical form. SoftWare Automation uses computer-enabled cameras to track the location of the fabric and determine stitching position. But Sewbo appears to be the only startup using a stiffener to make fabric adaptable to existing robots–a cheaper solution than building a machine that uses cameras and algorithms to manipulate fabric, since Zornow estimates the cost of plastic needed to stiffen one shirt is less than 10 cents.

Zornow was inspired when he read an article describing the properties of polyvinyl alcohol, which is used in 3D printing as a temporary scaffolding so complex shapes don’t collapse as they’re being built. His concept is similar, but uses the plastic in liquid form. Once the cut fabric has been dipped in the plastic, it can be molded, aligned, and welded together.

Right now, Zornow’s prototype doesn’t do all those things, but that’s because those tasks–including cutting fabric from a pattern–have already been automated. He’s focused on creating the right process so that two cut pieces can be sewn together with no human touch needed. For the first three years of the project, which he started working on in 2012, he experimented, researched, and continued to run his idea by people in the industry in order to poke holes in the concept. It was only when he’d surpassed his own skepticism toward the project, he finally quit his job, found investors, and launched Sewbo into the world.

Source: Fast Company