Smart Robot End-Effector for Fabric Stack Pick-and-Place
Overview
The end-effector uses a roller with a suction port to roll and grasp various fabric shapes, ensuring a wrinkle-free hold. This design prevents unwanted fabric deformation and damage during grasp and can release the fabric smoothly for various garment production processes.
Commercialisation opportunities
IP Licensing, Technology co-development
Problem addressed
Handling soft, flexible fabrics poses a challenge for robots, especially separating a single layer from a stack—a repetitive garment manufacturing task complicated by loose, intertwined threads. This patent technology offers a reliable solution.
Innovation
- Equipped with suction-rollers, the end-effectors can securely hold the target fabric part by grasping it on two sides.
- Precisely position a fabric part at a desired location by using the visual information captured by the vision sensor system.
- The force sensors attached to the manipulator can apply a uniform, controllable tension on the fabric to maintain its shape, flatten it without wrinkles and slacks during the positioning process.
Key impact
- Ensure the accurate pick-and-place of the topmost single fabric layer.
- Keep the fabric part flat by applying controlled tension from both sides.
- Designed to grasp various types of fabric parts with different dimensions by varying the strategy of rolling.
- The failure detection and recovery design allows automatic retry if a sensor detects a grasping failure, ensuring uninterrupted operation.
Award
- Silver medal at the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2024
Application
- Fabric Stack Pick-and-Place at various garment manufacturing processes.
Patent
- PCT patenet filed: PCT/CN2023/090533
Centre for Transformative Garment Production (TransGP) was established with the collaborative effort of The University of Hong Kong and Tohoku University. The Centre aims to provide solutions for the needs of the future society, where labour shortage would arise from population aging, and where increasing percentage of the mankind will be living in megacities. The Centre also targets at driving paradigm shift for reindustrializing selected sectors, i.e. garment industry, which is still relying on labour-intensive operations but with clear and identified processes for transformation. A number of goals are expected to be achieved through the Centre’s research programmes, such as to leverage the proprietary AI and robotics technology to shorten development cycles, to improve engineering efficiency and to prevent faults and increase safety by automating risky activities.
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