Garment Handling by Dual Manipulators

-1^st report：Development of Robot Hand for Garment Grasping -

Abstract

In recent years, the need of automation in the garment manufacturing has increased, due to labor shortage and an increased demand. In garment manufacturing the handling and manipulation of the fabric is estimated as the 80 percent of the total production line time. Therefore, there is a large research interest in designing grippers for handling fabrics. Our goal is to develop a robot system to handle garment and perform post-production tasks such as placing it into ironing or screen printing machines. In this paper, we describe the design of an underactuated robot hand that can grasp garment, and test its effectiveness through a task of setting the garment on a rectangular plate emulating a screen printing machine.