Modeling of plain knitted fabrics for their deformation control

A new approach to the modeling of plain knitted fabrics is presented for their deformation control. There exist many manipulative operations that deal with deformable soft objects such as clothes, papers, wires etc. At present, most of these operations are still done manually by skilled workers. Therefore, it is important to automate this process, especially the process of knitted fabrics manipulation in the garment industries. However, automatic handling of knitted fabrics is difficult to perform by machines since the knitted fabrics are often deformed and extended during the operations. Furthermore, it is difficult to control the shape of the knitted fabrics. In order to control the deformation of knitted fabrics, a physical model of the fabrics is essential. In this paper, we present a physical model of plain knitted fabrics. Firstly, the structure of plain knitted fabrics is explained. Secondly, the behavior of cross points of a plain knitted fabric is investigated experimentally. Then, a physical model of the fabrics is developed based on the iterative structure of the fabrics. Model parameters are selected considering the behavior of the cross points. Finally, the validity of the proposed model is examined by comparing computed shape of a fabric with its real image.