A toolbox of garment handling techniques

Garment manufacturing remains one of the largest labour intensive manufacturing industries. Hard automation is generally not feasible because of the wide range of styles, sizes and fabrics used in clothing, all of which are subject to the whims of fashion. The threat of competition from low labour cost countries has given rise to a number of research programmes in the use of flexible automation, the aim being to reduce labour content and help ensure consistently high quality production which can adapt rapidly to market needs. Such initiatives have taken place in Japan through the TRASS project (Iguchi, 1990), in the USA in various programmes but recently as part of the AMTEX project (Black, 1993), in Europe under BRITE-EURAM (BRITE-EURAM 1991), ESPRIT etc. And in the UK under the aegis of the ACME Directorate of the EPSRC. During this research many novel handling techniques have been devised and these form a handling toolbox which can be used as the building blocks for complete automated systems or as handling aids to operatives