Destacking System of Fabric Part

Speaker

Akira Seino, TransGP

Co-author

Kazuhiro Kosuge

Abstract

Handling fabric components is one of the most common and essential tasks in garment factories. For example, picking a single fabric part from its stack is frequently done for the manufacturing process. Many types of grippers have been developed so far for handling the fabric part. Parallel grippers, originally designed for grasping rigid objects, are often used to grasp fabric parts. Different types of grippers specialized for handling a fabric part have also been developed using pneumatic forces, pneumatic suction mechanism, electro-adhesion mechanism, needles penetrated into the fabric part, and so on. Power source is required to use these. We propose a novel solution for handling the fabric without using any actuators. All internal movements of the gripper are mechanically driven, eliminating the need for external power sources. Since the proposed gripper can be easily used simply by attaching it to a system, the gripper is expected to contribute to automation in a factory at a low cost.

Speaker Bio

Akira Seino received the B.S. degree in Engineering from the Department of Mechanical System Engineering at Yamagata University, Japan, in 2014, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from the Department of Bioengineering and Robotics, and the Department of Robotics at Tohoku University, Japan, in 2016 and 2019, respectively. From 2019 to 2021, he was a project assistant professor in the Department of Symbiotic Systems Science at Fukushima University, Japan. Since 2021, he is currently a Research Officer at the Centre for Transformative Garment Production, Hong Kong SAR, and a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. The Centre for Transformative Garment Production was established by the collaborative research between the University of Hong Kong and Tohoku University, under the InnoHK initiative funded by the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government. This work has been also supported in part by the JC STEM Lab of Robotics for Soft Materials funded by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.