Robots Will Soon Take Over Your Sewing Needs

The were known to have assembled cars, they perform surgery, and they even handle cargo at airports. But give most robots a needle and thread, and they would probably come undone.

That's why practically all the clothes sold in the world today are still made by hand, often by very low-paid workers in Asia.

Those workers may use tools such as sewing machines but fully automating such labour is difficult. "You have a problem if it's sewing," says Cam Myers, founder and chief executive of California-based CreateMe, a robotics company. "You have to keep [two pieces of fabric] in alignment under motion."

His company takes another approach. Forget sewing – glue the pieces of fabric together instead. "Once the adhesive is laid down, you simply line something over it and stamp." CreateMe has designed robots that do this and the firm is already making women's underwear this way. It will begin producing t-shirts, too, in the coming months. Mass production could follow next year.

Roboticists have eyed the garment manufacturing industry for decades. If machines could ever take over such work, clothes-making could come back to countries in the West, and the environmental footprint of garments might be slashed in the process. But millions of textile workers could also be out of a job.

Just a few percent of clothes sold today in the UK are made here. It's a similar story in the US. Myers says he has customers seeking to market garments as "made in the US", with US-produced cotton, for example.

"We can use cotton, we can use wool, we can use leather," he says, of CreateMe's adhesive-based process. If just 10 percent of t-shirt manufacturing moved back to the US with the help of automation, that would be a huge industry shift, he adds.

The adhesive CreateMe uses is thermoset, which means that ironing or washing machine temperatures aren't enough to melt it and make the clothes fall apart, insists Myers. He adds that, because these garments lack seams, they are streamlined and can also be manufactured on moulds that capture the contours of the human body.

Even Myers acknowledges that a key challenge in apparel is that it is "high flex" – in other words, you won't get very far if you just make white t-shirts. Customers like choosing from an endless array of garments, with varying form factors, colours and designs. Clothes-producing robots are still a long way from doing all that.

And there remains a debate over the fundamentals.

"We don't believe that sewing is going away," says Palaniswamy Rajan, chairman and chief executive of Softwear Automation, based in the US state of Georgia. He points out that visible stitching is a key component in the design of many fashionable garments, perhaps most famously jeans.

Rajan says that his company will soon announce the third generation of its sewing robots, which he claims will make t-shirts at the same cost as importing them to the US. However, he declines to discuss any details about the technology.