Automated Clothing Assembly Line



Today, sewing relies on the low-tech power of human hands, but soon that may not be the case. Human workers are still needed for the final steps of making clothes, in order to align fabrics and correctly feed them into sewing machines. If robots could do that instead, shock waves of change would surely ripple through global supply chains and disrupt the lives of millions of low-wage earners in the developing world.

For better or worse, plenty of technologists, researchers, and companies are working on the challenge of automating textile sewing but so far, getting robots to navigate the imprecisions of flimsy textile materials that easily bend has proven elusive.

One promising solution, though, has come from the brain of Jonathan Zornow, a young freelance web developer with no previous background in robotics, manufacturing, or the apparel business. His project, Sewbo, recently demonstrated the world’s first robotically sewn garment.

The solution Zornow then came up with is almost laughably simple. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into fancier robots, he decided to find a way to stiffen the clothes in order to make them suitable for robotic machines.

It seemed that the standard approach to robotic sewing has been to counter the complexity of working with fabrics, with equally complex machines,. Instead, Zornow removed the complexity by making the fabrics stiff.

He decided to use a water-soluble polymer that washes out in warm water and can temporarily stiffen fabric, meaning the robot is handling a precisely-defined object when stitching the garment. The inspiration for that came to him while reading an article in Make Magazine that explored the water-soluble support structures for 3D printers.

To prove out the concept, Zornow rented an off-the-shelf robotic arm, which he used to demonstrate the approach. Then, last year, he formally announced the project as the first time a robot has been able to sew a garment. And he’s now pursuing the project full time to turn it into a business and was even invited to a robotics manufacturing consortium sponsored by the US Department of Defense.

Many people are surprised to learn that this is the very first time that a robot has been used to sew a piece of clothing. The big hurdle has been that robots can’t reliably handle fabrics. Sewbo figured out how to temporarily stiffen materials, making it easy for industrial robots to assemble clothes.

Learn more at sewbo.com

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