Vision servo control of a robotic sewing system

The FIGARO robotic sewing system was developed to perform assembly and handling operations on cloth. A flexible automation approach was adopted, in which the robot was required to control the cloth panel during both handling and sewing operations, without the aid of hard automation attachments that might limit the flexibility of the system. A technique was developed for producing a seam parallel to an edge of arbitrary contour, which was based on sensory serving of the robot. The development of the seam width control system is described. It was designed using simulation studies that took into account the control transfer function and nonlinearities such as camera pixel resolution, time delays and robot motion limitations. Satisfactory performance was achieved for sewing speeds up to 3000 r.p.m. for typical cloth panel curvatures