How KSL and Pfaff will come closer together in the future
Times change, people and machine change their relationship with each other. Which tasks can a robot do? How effectively can it do that work? What are the benefits of this? These and related questions were reason enough for Dürkopp Adler to initiate industry studies, and some of them were to be seen at Texprocess.
“Robot technology and networking are the main themes”, says Martin Schmidt of Dürkopp Adler. Many things for which the fashion sector is not yet ready are already state-of-the-art in the car industry. “The degree of automation is high, especially in the composites field”, says Schmidt.
Robots can be used, for example, to automatically swap spools during sewing without having to stop the process. KSL and Pfaff have developed a machine of this kind. And this is not only of interest when a reel comes to an end but also when different coloured yarns are to be used. Normally, the operator on an intelligent, high-speed sewing machine has to change a spool every 20 to 30 minutes. However, the robot can not only carry out this work but also, thanks to sensor control, automatically sew collars.
Automatic spools swap
Like sewing, welding can also be carried out fully automatically. Welding systems firstly cut the material, then they can decorate it or join T-shirts via full-surface welded seams. Areas of application involving small parts also include the production of trouser pockets and, more recently, three-dimensional bellow pockets. The dimensions differ greatly when it comes to the production of, for example, aircraft and wind-park parts made of composites. Sewing heads in house-sized robot plants combine parts of several metres that, thanks to the use of technical textiles and composites, weigh only a fraction of their predecessors.
