Design of shape-following manipulator for three-dimensional sewing of flexible fabrics

Aiming at the problems of difficult processing and poor stability in processing quality of automatic three-dimensional sewing of flexible fabrics in the garment manufacturing industry, a shape-following manipulator suitable for automatic three-dimensional sewing of flexible fabrics was proposed. The sewing process was analyzed initially and a shape-following manipulator was designed. The position, velocity and acceleration of the manipulator and its workspace were analyzed, before the mechanical analysis and verification of the manipulator structure were carried out. Experiment results show that the manipulator can adapt to the sleeve with cuff diameter ranging from 200 mm to 260 mm. It can automatically tighten the fabrics according to the force feedback without damage to the fabrics. The manipulator can automatically adjust fabrics, and the one finger adjustment range was -12.6-16.8 mm. The relative error of the experiments was 4.34%, and the maximum error was 0.7 mm, which meets the actual sewing process requirements. © 2022 China Textile Engineering Society. All rights reserved.