Robotex: robotic handling of multiple sheets of fabric

The clothing manufacturing industry has historically been labour intensive and whilst recent progress has enabled automation to be widely used from cutting of fabric parts to automated warehouses there remain tasks that have proved to be exceedingly difficult to automate efficiently. The main area in which this is true is the handling of the fabric during making-up. This paper examines the manual tasks of handling the cut fabric and describes the automation solutions for the assembly of parts which have different curvature and different length.