Collaborative Research Project into Automated Sewing of SIT & JUKI

While automation has been progressing in various fields in recent years, many sewing works are still performed by human hands. The main reason for this is that sewing works treat soft materials such as leather and cloth, and it is difficult to apply conventional automation　technology to the sewing works and achieve the same level of work quality as humans. There is a strong demand for automation of sewing works, as sewing by human hand can lead to quality variations and much time and cost is required for training workers. Therefore, Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) and JUKI Corporation have been conducting together since 2015 on various automation research projects related to sewing works. In this presentation, we will introduce two of the results of these projects. The first is a newly developed robot hand that can handle thin fabrics. This hand can grasp only one piece of thin fabric from a stack of stacked fabrics by using a dust brush material to pull the surface of the top fabric. The second is the realization of 3D sewing, which is a particularly difficult task among sewing tasks. We have developed a system and method that uses a conventional sewing machine and a robot arm to sew together the edges of two differently shaped parts to automatically create three-dimensional products. By feeding the edges of two parts accurately using a guide set and a semicircular robot hand, the task of stitching the edges of semi-circular and rectangular parts together in three dimensions with a robot arm was realized.