Control System for Non-holonomic Sewing Dynamics

Sewing the fabric along the fabric edge is one of the most important processes in garment production, which cannot be automated due to the inherent softness of fabrics and limited capabilities of traditional automated systems. To address these challenges and advance sewing automation, we propose a novel time-scaling modelling and control architecture for robotic sewing systems. The sewing process is modelled as a non-holonomic system, which is exactly linearized by applying the time-scaling technique. By emulating the operation of the human workers, we further propose a real-time sewing architecture, which generates the motions of manipulator by pre-defined motion primitives. An experimental platform is developed to validate the proposed robotic sewing system. The sewing results show that the proposed control system ensures the exponential convergence of the sewing trajectories to the desired seam without overshooting. The high sewing accuracy demonstrates the application potential of the proposed system.