Robotic Sewing System for Fully Automated Fabric Picking, Stacking, Loading, Sewing, and Unloading

Sewing is a labor-intensive process that still heavily relies on human operators in garment production. To reduce manual effort, semi-automatic sewing machines have been introduced, but they require dedicated fixtures that must be redesigned for each fabric shape, size, material, and seam line. This paper proposes a fully automated sewing system without the use of dedicated fixtures. The system performs fabric picking, stacking, loading, sewing, and unloading for relatively thin fabrics. The system consists of a dual-arm manipulator, rolling-up end-effectors, a sewing head of a pattern sewer, force sensors, and cameras. The system is designed so that all devices can be centrally controlled by a single PC. A control strategy is also presented, including image segmentation, pose estimation, and end-effector trajectory calculation for sewing along a predefined seam line. Experimental results demonstrate consistent and high-quality stitching along various predefined seam lines.