Host: The Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers
Name : 2018 International Symposium of Flexible Automation
Location : Kanazawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kanazawa Japan
Date : July 15, 2018 - July 19, 2018
Pages 225-228
Despite the recent rapid increase of robots in manufacturing, much of the garment industry remains largely reliant on human labor. Part of the difficulty in introducing automation to this industry lies in the complexity of modeling and manipulating flexible materials, such as fabric, especially at the high speed needed to handle the throughput expected of a modern clothing manufacturer. Previous work has demonstrated the ability to control fabric motion through a distributed actuation system under the assumption that the fabric maintains a rigid planar shape. This paper introduces a method by which a depth sensor, in conjunction with a template matching algorithm described in a companion paper [1], can identify gross fabric deformation in real time and demonstrates a control method for restoring the fabric to a rigid planar form.
