Mechanization of Cloth Plication

A person on an average spends nearly a year on the process of folding clothes. In this paper, we sought to reduce the human effort and time involved in the process by automating it. Any process of folding garments essentially requires the clothes to be brought to a standard or recognizable form to identify corners, collars or stitches. This is the innate difficulty in mechanizing the process. Our paper aims to transform a heap of clothes to a folded stack by means of simple mechanisms and electronic control systems. The work is divided into three sections based on the objectives to be attained at the end of each. The first stage involves isolating a single cloth from a heap. The next stage focuses on unfurling the cloth to a recognizable form and orienting it in a way that is compatible with the final stage. The last section of the project folds the clothes. In addition to these three main functions, automating the process also requires the clothes to be transferred between these stages. Scaled models of the first and last stages were assembled from commercial components and tested on a t-shirt, but their use can be extended to other garments with simple modifications. The unfurling stage is still in its infancy- a pliable concept that requires rigorous testing.