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New T-Shirt Sewing Robot Can Make As Many Shirts Per Hour As 17 Factory Workers (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In 2015, after years of research, SoftWear Automation introduced LOWRY, a sewing robot, or sewbot, that uses machine vision to spot and adjust to distortions in the fabric. Though initially only able to make simple products, such as bath mats, the technology is now advanced enough to make whole t-shirts and much of a pair of jeans. According to the company, it also does it far faster than a human sewing line. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line. Another way to look at it is that the robot, working under the guidance of a single human handler, can make as many shirts per hour as about 17 humans. The company has emerged as a leader among those trying to automate sewing, drawing the interest of businesses that make home goods and of course clothing manufacturers, including Tianyuan Garments Company, a Chinese firm that produces for brands such as Adidas and Armani. Tianyuan Garments has invested $20 million in a 100,000-square foot factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, planned to open in 2018. The factory will be staffed with 21 robotic production lines supplied by SoftWear Automation, and will be capable of making 1.2 million t-shirts a year.
So that's like... a few dozen jobs at the most? Surely with the production costs going down the shirts will be sold at lower prices, right?
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I thought jails were gender-segregated. How are you going to get a broad in a jail?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I honestly thought a robotic sewing machine would be called SEWER instead of LOWRY.
That name stinks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Roughly half the population has an IQ below average. Bleeding the other half to lower the cost of education for everyone is not going to help.
The real issue is not education, it's the fucking sorcerer's apprentices at the Fed who unleash their flawed models on real people. It's the meddlers in Washington who should focus on their real mandate (the army and the postal service). It's the common thieves in TSA uniforms that strangle the transportation industry with more impact than the terrorists.
China has nothing on the USA, except less imbeciles rolling the dice with public money. Get rid of the looters and you will see the great American business culture rise from the ashes.
lucm, indeed.
I think this time the pressure isn't from cost, rather the pressure for ethical clothing manufacture, which admittedly, has good intentions in trying to make manufacturers pay their workers more, but while that seems like a simple solution, to pay workers more, so is not employing people... Can't be exploiting your staff if you haven't got any...
So unintended consequences screws up good intentions, again. Using "unintended consequences" loosely, its not as if this sort of thing was "unforeseen" by those who had a microeconomics class. But hey, no foul, good intentions outweigh simplistic shallow solutions to extremely complex matters.