DARPA Wants Robots to Manufacture Military Uniforms
June 8th, 2012Via: Wired:
The company on the receiving end of Darpa’s award, SoftWear Automation Inc., has so far developed “a conceptual” version of just the automated system that the agency’s after. The basic principle behind the company’s innovation, according to its website, is a robotic system that relies on an extremely precise monitoring of a given fabric’s “thread count” to move it through a sewing machine in the proper direction and at the right pace. Dr. Steve Dickerson, the company CEO and a robotics and engineering researcher, didn’t respond to request for comment.
Along with co-authors from Georgia Tech, Dickerson elaborated on his robo-tailoring science in a 2010 paper, presented at a robotics conference in Tokyo. As it turns out, automated garment production has, for decades, been something of a holy grail among clothing manufacturers. But despite hundreds of millions spent on research since the 1980s, the report laments that nearly all industrial sewing relies, archaically, on human hands.
The automation process proposed by Dickerson works something like this. First, an “overhead, pick-and-place robot” grabs the necessary pieces of fabric and places them at the head of a sewing machine. The appliance itself would be equipped with “machine vision” capabilities, specific enough to spot and track individual fabric threads. That intel would “provide fabric location information” to actuators that operate the sewing machine’s needle and thread, and “budgers” — motorized balls, underneath the sewing machine that latch onto the fabric via vacuum seal — that move the material to and fro.
Should Dickerson’s automated sweatshop materialize, it could offer mucho savings to the military’s billion-dollar garment production process. According to the company, automated sewing “appears to allow cutting and sewing at costs less than in China.”
