|
|
|
|
|
|
by Robotbeat
2362 days ago
|
|
|
Fabric is a very hard problem because it has an extremely high number of degrees of freedom. Flexible materials are like this consistently. If you want automation, with few exceptions, you want stiffness. Tesla has been unable to automate wire harness installation because it's super flexible with many effective degrees of freedom (they hope to solve that using a stiffer flex cable that consolidates the wiring). Even moving some fiberglass fluff with a robot was an unreliable bottleneck they eventually removed. I even saw a project once that attempted to automate cloth handling by first stiffening the cloth with starch so it could be more predictably moved from place to place. Cloth is fundamentally hard. It's not impossible to solve these problems, but it's not at all trivial. |
|
|
Hah! I thought I was the only one to have this notion...
I was thinking of impregnating cloth with a hard wax similar to candle wax and then melting it out after automated sewing.
Starch makes more sense from a cleanup perspective, but it may not have the required control over stiffness or other useful properties.
For example, wax would allow temporary joins using pressing and heating, which would then hold the material in place before the permanent sewing.