A Robotic Collaborative Sewing System Based on Visual and Force Perception

The automation of the sewing process in garment manufacturing industry is at a low level. For this problem, an intelligent sewing system in which the robot cooperates with the sewing machine based on visual and force perception information is designed and built to realize automatic sewing of various polygon fabrics. A fabric feature extraction method based on corner detection is used to realize trajectory planning for robotic sewing. Based on the hybrid position/force control strategy, collaborative operation of the robot and the sewing machine in sewing process is realized to ensure the sewing quality. Finally, the effect of the single-side robotic sewing and the overall effect of sewing the polygon fabric edge at different speeds are tested. The experimental results show that the designed robotic sewing system can realize the collaborative sewing of the two machines at different speeds. The error of the distance from the stitch to the fabric edge is less than 2 mm, the error of stitch distance is less than 0.5 mm, and the error of the total stitch length is less than 1.6 cm.