Flexible garment handling with adaptive control strategies

Sewing is the most important joining technology in garments, home textiles as well as technical textiles manufacturing. While the sewing process itself has been highly automated, the handling of the textiles have been largely neglected. Thereby, more than 80% of production time are executed in manual handling processes. The non-linear material behavior imposes significant difficulties when automating the sewing and handling process. Further problems arise from 3D shaped products, which are sewn from 2D fabrics, compounded by ever changing fashions and new fabrics. This paper presents an approach for flexible automated garment handling. After viewing on the different fabric properties, different handling technologies for transportation are described. Based on specific material behavior, gripper types are able to be chosen for best reliability in production process. Another key feature of this paper is the handling during sewing process. Different strategies for controlling seam quality are outlined. Especially, the use of ACG (adaptive control geometrical) controller as part of a new automated sewing system is described.