In the red age of singing textile women workers, perhaps no one would have imagined that the "fine work" of clothing would be replaced by machines; in the days when the profits of hundreds of millions of shirts could be changed to a large passenger plane, more People only sit in front of the sewing machine and work quietly.

Under the general trend of " machine substitution ", from the car to the mobile phone and digital products, the production line has already had robots. But for a long time, the robot could not adapt to the production of the garment - because the fabric is soft, the ductility is strong, how the machine realizes the layering and grasping of the fabric, how to avoid the deformation when the shift is retained, how to cut the seam Accurate positioning and so on, has become a common problem in the global textile industry and automation industry.

However, advances in technology, these problems are being overcome one by one.

The textile robot Sewbot, developed by Soft Wear Automation in Atlanta, USA, can completely automate the entire garment manufacturing process. The robot does not require human intervention and produces T-shirts with an efficiency of up to 22 seconds.

Soft Wear Automation has a number of rollers on the production line to control the smooth and smooth transfer of the fabric by controlling the direction of rotation of the rollers. It is equipped with a four-axis robot arm and vacuum suction cup, which can lift the fabric flat. Put it where you need it. The Sewbot robot is equipped with a high-precision image recognition system that captures more than 1000 frames per second, and then analyzes each frame by algorithm to accurately find the position of the trace on the fabric. In addition, the company has developed a dedicated robotic manipulator that simulates the sewing machine operator's work. These operators are controlled by precision linear actuators that guide the fabric through the sewing machine with precision to sub-millimeter levels and prevent material distortion.

If you think that this robot can only produce clothes, it is a big mistake. Wal-Mart has invested $2 million to make it part of the automatic jeans production program. Tianyuan Garment Co., Ltd., a supplier of big brands such as Adidas, Armani and Reebok, opened a $20 million factory in Arkansas in early 2018 and announced the introduction of the robot.

Of course, textile robots are not foreign “patents”. The Esquel garment factory from Foshan, Guangdong has developed 25 kinds of automation equipment for each process. Today, in this company, all 52 processes of a woven shirt are made, and 65% are from the hands of these "sewing robots".

In the automated sewing and weaving sewing workshop on the 2nd floor of the company, an automated production line consisting of various components such as robots and electronic eyes will be used to pull the cylinder, trim the neck, press the bark, and open the button. In one, it operates accurately under the command of a computer program, and it takes less than 30 seconds to complete the left front of a shirt.

The footwear industry has also joined the "automation army"

Keen, a well-known American shoe manufacturer, cooperated with House of Design, an automation solution company, to create the world's smallest shoe factory “Uneekbot Factory Store” with two robotic arms for its brand Unek, which can create customized sandals for consumers anytime, anywhere. It takes 30 minutes.

When the “factory” is started, the two robotic arms work together to create customized Uneek sandals, automatically select the correct color string and start to thread the needles; in fact, in the fastest setting, the robot can be as short as 6 minutes. You can complete a pair of shoes, about twice the speed of the human hand, and then hand over the finished shoes to the staff for inspection, and complete the last few steps to draw a line for the production of the shoes.

Coincidentally, Nike, a well-known sports brand, also introduced robots in production. A startup called Grabit, which the company invested in, provided several shoe assembly robots to the Nike shoe factory, which worked 20 times faster than workers.

Grabit's shoe-making robots can work with workers to get the job done. The software first determines how to stack the materials used to make the vamp, and then lets the light illuminate certain parts of the glass table, instructing the worker to place the material in these locations. Next, a platform covered by the electrostatic adsorption panel is lowered, the materials are sucked, and transferred to the partially finished shoes, the power of the electrodes is turned off, the upper material is placed in a suitable position, and finally all the materials are sent. Into the hot press. It takes 10 to 20 minutes for workers to finish the upper material, and Grabit's robot can do the same job in 50 to 70 seconds.

Is automation suitable for the apparel industry?

In recent years, the apparel industry represented by the textile industry has created a large number of job opportunities in Southeast Asia and South Asian countries. South Asian countries with large populations and low wages hope that the demographic dividend will lead the country to economic prosperity. The World Bank estimates that South Asia will add 1.2 million workers a month in the next 20 years and will increase to 240 million in 20 years.

However, there are views that the automation technology developed at the other end of the world will have a huge impact on these countries and regions. In India, for example, a textile worker earns about $1,200 a year. Although a Sewbot costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is only a matter of time to replace human beings. It will damage the economic development model of emerging countries, including demographic dividends. South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, which are the foundations of economic growth, are under greater threat. Indian economists believe that the destructiveness of robots and artificial intelligence is greater than the impact of several industrial revolutions in the past, because artificial intelligence replaces not only some routine work, but also the demographic dividend will become a population nightmare.

Another point of view is that robots are too costly to pose a threat to practitioners in the apparel industry. Dan Kara, director of research at the Robotics, Automation and Intelligent Systems Division of ABI Research, a technology market intelligence company, said that robots are expensive and flat, and are not yet suitable for mass production.

The more compromised view is that at least cheap labor is now more competitive than machines. Jonathan Zornow, a software developer from Seattle, said that if you are in Bangladesh, when you have a room where you are willing to work for you for $1 a day, you won't buy a super-advanced textile robot. Instead, he sees textile robots as an opportunity to bring manufacturing closer to shoppers and shorten the long and sluggish supply chain—each T-shirt is transported on average about 20,000 miles to reach customers.