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The manufacturing industry faces serious challenges from aging populations, labor shortages, and environmental crises. Robotics enhanced with emerging AI technologies is expected to overcome these challenges by enabling automation of processes that have been difficult to automate with conventional robot technologies. While today’s industrial robots excel at manipulating rigid objects, labor-intensive processes involving soft materials—like garment manufacturing—remain difficult to automate. Soft materials are challenging to manipulate because their shape is unstable and depends on the surface they are in contact with. They are also affected by environmental factors that are difficult to estimate. This presentation briefly overviews robotics for soft materials and explores how AI and machine learning can address garment manufacturing challenges. Preliminary results are introduced, including fabric part manipulation, fixture-free 2D/3D sewing, high-speed edge sensing, bimanual texture alignment, dynamic motion planning, and garment flattening.
Professor Kazuhiro Kosuge is Director of the JC STEM Lab of Robotics for Soft Materials and Chair Professor of Robotic Systems, at the University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology (1978, 1980, 1988). After working at DENSO, Tokyo Tech, and Nagoya University, he joined Tohoku University as Professor in 1995 and served as Distinguished Professor (2018-2021) before joining HKU in 2021. IEEE RAS President (2010-2011), IEEE Division X Director (2015-2016), 2020 IEEE VP for Technical Activities. IEEE Life Fellow, a member of the Engineering Academy of Japan, and a recipient of Japan’s Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (2018).
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