We present a design of a form-changing female robotic mannequin for garment fitting. The fitting robot can change itself to imitate the body shape of a female person and replace her to finish the fitting process remotely. It can be used for reducing the return rate of garment e-commerce and increasing the order quantity of made-to-measure by avoiding the geographical restriction and the complicated process of trying on different clothes personally for a customer. In this paper, we mainly focus on the design of the mechanical structure and control system for the female fitting robot. By analyzing the characteristics of the skeleton structure and shape of female bodies, we design a block model for representing the surface of the fitting robot and an internal motion mechanism which is driven by a control system after inputting parameters of body sizes. On the basis of the design, a prototype of the form-changing female fitting robot is developed. Experimental results show that it can imitate a range of female body types.Key words : Form-changing fitting robot, Remote fitting, Garment e-commerce, Made-to-measure, Mechanical structure, Control system, Prototype
IntroductionNowadays, with the rapid development of Internet retailing and due to its convenience, more and more consumers prefer to online shopping. Clothing is a significant part of the Internet retailing and it is facing a serious problem of increasingly high rates of return goods. The main reason is that people could not try on the garment personally when they buy it online. Furthermore, the production standards of the clothing are different depending on the manufacturers. That makes it very difficult for customers to buy fitting clothes online. So it causes some consumers have to return the clothing more than once if they do not get the sizing they want. It makes that online shopping has become costly and time-consuming. In order to solve this problem, we design a form-changing female robotic mannequin. The consumers only need to input the data of body size on the user interface. Then the fitting robot can change itself to imitate the body shape of the consumer and carry out the complicated process of trying different clothes. Then the fitting results will be sent back to consumers in the form of photographs. It will enable consumers to see whether the clothes fit them and therefore, make better decisions. The fitting process of the fitting robot is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 The service process of a fitting robot. Guo, Dongliang Zhang, Shaodong Zhang, Liu and Li, Journal of Advanced Mechanical Design, Systems, and Manufacturing, Vol.10, No.8 (2016) Made-to-measure garment is a kind of consumer goods for high-income groups. In the process of made-to-measure, consumers have to try on the garment for several times to ensure whether it is suitable for them. It requires the customer and the tailor to be located geographically near to each other. So the geographical position is a main factor that restricts the development of the made-to-measure garmen...
The paper presents a panel-based robotic mannequin for garment fitting. This robot can deform the shell panels and change their positions to simulate different consumers' body shapes. Then it will replace consumers to try on the clothes remotely, so as to avoid the troubles caused by geographical location. This paper mainly introduces the structural design and optimization of a new fitting robot, which comprises the optimization of the shell panels, the design of the mechanical structure, and the optimization of the control system. Furthermore, to obtain the fitting results of different body postures, we design a detachable arm structure. Based on the above work, we develop a new prototype of the female robotic mannequin. The testing results show that the accuracy of the deformation and the stability of the whole structure are improved. The fitting robot can accurately simulate most of the female human bodies and smoothly complete the remote fitting process. It can be applied to garment ecommerce, personalized customization and virtual fitting.
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