Is this a game-changer? Garment-industry automation

Last updated on: June 4, 2015 at 7:51 am by Jane the Actuary

Is this a game-changer? Garment-industry automation 2015-06-04T07:51:30-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Per The Economist, in a preview of their upcoming issue, as tweeted by them, “Made to measure; A robotic sewing machine could throw garment workers in low-cost countries out of a job.” I suspect this is paywalled, but what’s being reported is that an Atlanta textile-equipment manufacturer, SoftWear Automation, believes it has made great strides in solving the puzzle of automation of garment-sewing.

There have been many attempts to automate sewing. Some processes can now be carried out autonomously: the cutting of fabric, for instance, and sometimes sewing buttons or pockets. But it is devilishly difficult to make a machine in which fabric goes in one end and finished garments, such as jeans and T-shirts, come out the other. The particularly tricky bit is stitching two pieces of material together. This involves aligning the material correctly to the sewing head, feeding it through and constantly adjusting the fabric to prevent it slipping and buckling, while all the time keeping the stitches neat and the thread at the right tension. Nimble fingers invariably prove better at this than cogs, wheels and servo motors.

“The distortion of the fabric is no longer an issue. That’s what prevented automatic sewing in the past,” says Steve Dickerson, the founder of SoftWear Automation, a textile-equipment manufacturer based in Atlanta, where Dr Dickerson was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The company is developing machines which tackle the problems of automated sewing in a number of ways. They use cameras linked to a computer to track the stitching. Researchers have tried using machine vision before, for instance by having cameras detect the edge of a piece of fabric to work out where to stitch.

The Atlanta team, however, have greatly increased accuracy by using high-speed photography to capture up to 1,000 frames per second. These images are then manipulated by software to produce a higher level of contrast. This more vivid image allows the computer to pick out individual threads in the fabric. Instead of measuring the fabric the robotic sewing machine counts the number of threads to determine the stitching position. As a consequence, any distortion to the fabric made by each punch of the needle can be measured extremely accurately. These measurements also allow the “feed dog”, which gently pulls fabric through the machine, to make constant tiny adjustments to keep things smooth and even.

The article then goes on to describe further innovations but, yes, also the potential impact on the industry, where two competing priorities — reducing costs to the last penny and yet, for the trend-focused part of the industry, getting products on shelves as quickly as possible — will impact the degree to which automation is adopted, and where the new robot factories are located.

Now, a while back (2013) I read a book on the fashion industry, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (here’s my summary of the book), which discussed the simultaneous perpetual movement to the lowest-possible-wage country and the rise of “fast fashion,” in which fashion for teen girls and young adult women had become focused on getting new designs (if you can call them that) in the stores as quickly as possible, but with little interest in quality garment construction. And at the time, I tried to find out where things stood with respect to automation, and came up pretty empty-handed in my search engine results –nothing more than one article about, interestingly, the same company as The Economist profiles, but which gave me, at the time, the impression that significant progress was a long ways off.

So on the one hand: it would be great to bring some of that production back to the U.S., no doubt about it.

On the other hand: this will disrupt the garment industry as a major path forward in the economic development of poor countries, especially the trajectory of moving every higher up in the value-added chain.

On the third hand: well, this is pretty inevitable, isn’t it? It will be disruptive, and we do not know what the path forward will be, but we can’t just put a brake on the whole thing. Remember the Luddites? The Industrial Revolution was pretty disruptive. There were winners and losers then, and there will be again, and a lot of angst, and debates over what happens to those who lose their jobs, or whether the wealthy are benefiting disproportionately.

But in the meantime — oh, who am I kidding? I’ve still got that telecommuting/middle-age weight gain to deal with before I go shopping at proper retailers again, rather than picking up some slacks at the Goodwill.

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