A New Electrostatic Gripper for Flexible Handling of Fabrics in Automated Garment Manufacturing

The handling of fabrics is a very challenging task throughout automated garment manufacturing. There are practical difficulties in designing and implementing a reliable gripper to efficiently handling fabric panels. In this paper, we present a new and flexible electrostatic gripper for the handling of fabrics. Our gripper consists of four flat pads and their embedded electrode patterns generate electrostatic adhesion fields. The coverage area varies with the expansion of the four electrostatic pads. This allows handling various size of fabric panels and flattening folded/wrinkled fabrics. We partially verified our new gripper in prototype form and experimentally evaluated its performance on a large number of fabric materials. Moreover, the proposed gripper can be used for handling and transporting garments while avoiding the damage of fabric surfaces.