The UK’s first fashion manufacturing lab has opened its doors to fashion businesses and researchers who will benefit from its collaborative robotic technology – ‘cobots’ – that can be programmed to create sustainable high-value, low-volume garments.
The cobot arms have potential to stitch, draw, knit, and even 3D scan a mannequin or human body before prototyping a garment design.
The £3.8m Robotics Living Lab (RoLL) at Manchester Met’s Manchester Fashion Institute (MFI) will enable fashion designers and manufacturers to create and produce more sustainably, modernising fashion manufacturing and helping to address the industry’s skills shortage.
Funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council and building on Manchester’s rich heritage as the world’s first industrial city, RoLL will support the fashion industry’s role in the government’s new Industrial Strategy which commits to involving the creative industries and meeting clean energy targets.
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