Multi-Robot Collaboration for Electronic Textile Fabrication

This paper presents a deterministic alignment process of fabric textiles and MEMS clamps. We describe the capability of aligning and fastening textile layers to create electronic textiles using multi-robot collaboration in the NeXus, a custom additive manufacturing robotic system. To complete the alignment process, two industrial robotic arms and one custom positioner were employed. Also, different robotic process tools were used in the alignment and fastening process. A semi-automated interface was programmed and integrated with the robotic tool change process, visual servoing, target detecting, and UV curable adhesive printing functions within the NeXus. The yield of alignment results of the MEMS clamps was assessed, and the completed corresponding fabric intersections were more than 95%.