Looking at the New Course of Textile and Garment Automation from the Backflow Trend of American Ligh

Clothing industry has always been the representative industry of labor-intensive, in this field, robots have not been able to reach the center of the stage. Faced with soft fabrics, precision robots often have nowhere to start. Think about it. Hold a handful of sand, or a fist of water? This is the situation that ready-made clothing textiles need to face.



I. Cheaper Made in America

Over the years, manufacturing companies have long shifted production outside developed industrial countries on the basis of labor costs. China is the beneficiary of this path. With the soaring population and land prices, the busiest clothing manufacturing industry in China has begun to turn to Southeast Asia.



However, this habitual migratory bird migration path now has a reverse trend. As early as 2017, Chinese garment manufacturer Suzhou Tianyuan Garment invested in a factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, the home of Clinton. The company produces 10 million ready-made clothes annually for some brands, 90% of which are for high-end clothing and sporting goods, including Adidas. This time, it invested $20 million in a factory to start producing T-shirts. According to the plan, the factory will be put into production in the near future.



In order to shorten the supply chain, make products closer to consumers and avoid the increasing human costs in China, some clothing and sports shoes brands choose to leave China. This time, however, there is a surprising reason: to build factories in the United States is for lower costs!



Tianyuan's workshop in the United States is a factory using automated sewing technology & ldquo; advanced automation & rdquo; factory. High American labor costs no longer appear in the cost formula. Human beings seem to have been erased from the equation. Tianyuan Corporation & ldquo; employs & rdquo; and has about 330 automatic sewing robots, which can automatically complete each step of the production process from cutting fabric, sewing, post-quality inspection, etc.





For decades, robots have been used in large-scale garment production, but they mainly involve some very simple tasks in laser cutting fabrics or automatic sewing machines. Despite improving the efficiency of garment manufacturing, garment manufacturing is still labor-intensive. In fact, it is not easy for the garment industry to introduce robots. Soft fabric treatment is a very difficult job. It is asymmetrical, folded, and usually irregular; in addition, various components of the fabric must be aligned to the joint, such as buttons and holes.



This is an important reason why the garment industry has always been labor-intensive. Now with automatic sewing robots, the industry has suddenly added new variables.



Second, sewing stirred the most mysterious institution in the United States < br />.


This supplier of automatic sewing robots is called Softwear. It's easy to mistake it as & ldquo; software. But it doesn't matter if you read it wrong. It also has a lot to do with the algorithm of the software. Its rise depends entirely on the support of the United States Department of Defense. For many years, the United States has been worried about the sewing and production of military uniforms. Although the military uniform of American soldiers certainly does not need to be a fashionable style, it is used a lot. The Pentagon spends about $4 billion a year on uniforms.



The U.S. Department of Defense wants its soldiers to wear military uniforms made in the United States, but the cost has always been a big problem. To this end, DARPA, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, awarded a contract of $1.75 million in 2012 to the fledgling Softwear Company to develop automated garment sewing facilities. This delegation idea is the label of the standard American DARPA idealists (it is worth mentioning that many of these idealists of DARPA eventually come true). In other words, the mysterious DARPA, which always shows people with high technology, needs a garment robot factory to sew military uniforms from head to tail without manual operation.



Now it seems that Softwear is approaching its goal: at least in some areas of clothing manufacturing. Softwear uses robotic arms and vacuum suction to enhance, place and maintain fabric positions through machine vision systems. Considering fabric folding, thread head defects, irregular edges and corners, the robot must have a mature algorithm. Moreover, the imaging system is very fast. Because an operator can sew 5,000 stitches in a minute, the time left for the camera is too short. To solve this problem, the Softwear system uses one to capture more than 1 per second.A dedicated camera with 1000 frames and an image processing algorithm are used to detect the position of the needle so that its accuracy is within half a millimeter. In this way, a high-speed camera is used to capture the state of the fabric and a sewing robot is used to guide the sewing needle. The innovation of this automatic sewing robot is to move the needle onto the fabric instead of the cloth onto the needle. This innovation solves the most difficult problem of tension balance in garment sewing. Through the visual and real-time analysis of the robot, SoftWear can observe the fabric more accurately than the human eye, and track the position of the sewing needle with a maximum error of half a millimeter.



The Atlanta-based automatic sewing company was founded in 2007 by engineers from Georgia Institute of Technology. With the help of DARPA and Wal-Mart (which provided another $2 million), the first product was launched. At present, the company has raised more than $10 million in financing and used this automatic sewing technology to manufacture household textiles, including clothing, footwear, car seats, pillowcases and so on.



3. America and Vietnam & ldquo; scrambling for old kinetic energy & rdquo;



According to the American Apparel and Footwear Association, 97% of American clothing is imported. Americans have been asking: Can this change? SoftWear, a technology company, is seeking to boost the clothing and footwear industries in the United States. Local governments are not idle.



It is the efforts of Arkansas in the United States to match the automated sewing technology. Arkansas and Soochow Tianyuan have negotiated for a year, offering about $3.2 million in entry incentives, including infrastructure assistance and training funds, while cutting property tax on the facility by 65%, a total annual savings of $1.6 million. The U.S. state government is thinking that once fully operational, the plant will create 400 jobs, with an average wage of $14 an hour.



The 400-person job is a very important thing for an American governor.



In China, the clothing industry is often & ldquo; obsolete & rdquo; industry representatives. It seems that such old momentum will not be spared to be wiped out or transferred to Southeast Asia. The most worrying implication of old and new momentum lies in the fact that it forms an indescribable ldquo; industry despise chain & rdquo; and capable people climb backwards along this despise chain. Needless to say, banks that lend are often the source of this disdain chain. However, from the perspective of American practice, where is the difference between old and new kinetic energy? The so-called old kinetic energy industry, including the engine of innovation, is full of momentum. The new momentum industry can naturally show off its exponential growth of wealth, but the traditional industry can shine as well.



Where is intelligent manufacturing? In the traditional industry spontaneous self-redemption!



Don't think it's Vietnam, Indonesia, taking over & rdquo, China's old kinetic energy industry. In Southeast Asia, cheap, low-skilled workers will soon encounter a new professional killer: automatic sewing robots. It will reshape the global division of labor in manufacturing.



Little Rock City is such a microcosm. Tianyuan garment factory has 21 automatic assembly lines. Compared with traditional manual production, it is expected to reduce labor costs by 50% to 70%, while increasing productivity by more than 70%. When the production line is fully opened, a T-shirt is made every 22 seconds, producing about 23 million pieces a year. & The head of Tianyuan Garments once mentioned that even the cheapest labor market can't compete with us all over the world.



This automation technology can make every Adidas T-shirt in the factory from fabric cutting to sewing to finished products take about 4 minutes, while the production cost only needs 2 RMB.



And the technology is still developing rapidly. In 2017, SoftWear began to accelerate the development of fully automated production lines after receiving an investment of $4.5 million from investors CTW. Today, a year and a half later, the original 4 minutes can be shortened to 22 seconds, one operator can replace the original 11 people.



Tianyuan garment brand-new independent production line < br />


It's enough to defeat the world. Vietnam, of course, is not talking.



Manufacturing automation has been the focus of most industries for decades, but due to the unique characteristics of garment production, the progress in this field is relatively small. Steps such as cutting materials or sewing buttons have been successfully automated, but it is difficult to sew materials together. Therefore, compared with automobile and electronics manufacturers, the development of automation in garment industry is much slower.



However, traditional industries have their own ice-melting trips. With the success of such automatic sewing technology, it will have an impact around the world, including production in Central and Southeast Asian countries. Automated sewing is an emerging technology that can not be rejected more and more. In Accenture's Global Outsourcing Report 2018, it is pointed out that in the differentiated outsourcing model of garment manufacturing, tailoring and sewing automation lead all other technologies in the scale of investment. Because it's so tempting.



Outsourcing Trends Report (Accenture)



Brand apparel companies also need to change. With the retail industry being hit by the unprecedented impact of e-commerce, the Li & Fung Group controlled by the Feng family in Hong Kong has not been smooth in recent years. Have immense power to change nature or the established order of a country,For the future, the most important transformation action of Lifeng Group is digital strategy. In May 2018, Li & Fung announced the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement with Softwear. It will use Softwear's SEWBOT robotics technology, which will be twice as fast as manual sewing, thus greatly improving the core competitiveness of Lifeng: consolidating supply chain advantages and accelerating the automatic response speed of production process.



The price of automated sewing is still a barrier to promotion. The price of hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment has daunted many apparel manufacturers. For this reason, Softwear also launched the leasing business of “ Robot as a Service ” in 2018, which can rent a robot for $5,000 to promote the use of this technology. Efforts to melt ice are pushing forward automated sewing steadfastly.





Although automatic sewing is currently available only on T-shirts and shorts, the dynamism of the garment industry is clearly a long way to go. Softwear believes that in the next five years, its machines will be able to produce a dress shirt with a chest bag, which often takes 78 separate steps. The automatic production of jeans and dresses is also on the agenda. In fact, even T-shirts, there is a huge global market of 11.5 billion US dollars a year, while the United States and Europe are basically all imported & mdash; & mdash; the potential of localized production is huge. And the mission of this automatic sewing company is & ldquo; SewLocal & rdquo; local sewing! Perhaps the Defense Department's military uniforms will also be transferred to the production line in the United States.



Softwear is not a lonely forerunner. Sewbo Robotics, a Seattle startup, is also eager to bring the garment industry back to the United States. It uses another method, using a non-toxic polymer to temporarily harden the fabric, so that ready-made industrial robots can use & ldquo; hard cloth & rdquo; to make clothes, just like dealing with metal sheets. Blue Water Defense, which specializes in uniforms for the U.S. Department of Defense, produces 8,000 combat trousers a day, and is currently working with Sewbo to try out its robotic technology.



Sewbo Sewing Robot



Create local rather than global supply chains for the apparel industry. This is super good news for the United States and Europe, which are desperately seeking employment and manufacturing. Therefore, Softwear is also active in Europe. It went to Waalwijk, a small town in the Netherlands, to do “ talk about the future of footwear ” and advocate the return of automatic sewing in the footwear industry. More than 400 footwear companies, including a tannery, used to be one of the world's footwear centers, but now the manufacturing industry has basically lost, leaving almost all of them in retail. Can the footwear industry go back here and re-produce? Through the digital vamp production line, Softwear, with its fully automated uppers, is planning to help the Netherlands regain lost manufacturing positions.



For the global apparel manufacturing pattern that has been stable for many years, this will be a shocking shock. Apparel manufacturing is no longer a labor-intensive industry. Automatic sewing machine will become a milestone node. After the node, the garment manufacturing industry may really return to Europe and the United States.



4. Notes



The textile industry is making a comeback. The United States has created niche markets and competitive advantages in high-tech materials manufacturing. From 2009 to 2015, capital investment in yarn, fabrics and non-clothing textile products has increased from $960 million to $1.7 billion: an increase of 75%. In the market known as & ldquo; smart textiles & rdquo; the rapid development. Intelligent textiles are fabrics developed with new technologies, which provide new added value for textiles. From 2004 to 2014, the global smart textile industry grew at an annual rate of 18%, while the annual growth rate of smart textiles in the United States exceeded 27%. As an important strategic plan of the United States & ldquo; Reindustrialization & rdquo; the National Manufacturing Innovation Network (USA); Advanced Fabric Research Institute & rdquo; with an investment of nearly $200 million, is developing a new generation of smart textiles. Among the 14 options for future industries, American policymakers have left the textile industry! With flexible electronics, composite materials, robotics and other industries. What is the strategic perspective? This is the choice made by American & ldquo; Advanced Manufacturing & rdquo.



The larger market is that the United States imports $100 billion worth of clothing every year. If the industry can be automated and moved back to the United States, the global textile industry will change dramatically. McKinsey made a special report on this in October 2018 to evaluate, & ldquo; can garment manufacturing industry & lsquo; go home & rsquo; & rdquo;, so as to achieve backshore manufacturing?