Robotics Living Lab opens using collaborative robots to tackle sustainable fashion manufacturing

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, modernizing 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.

ROLL supports a re-shoring agenda. By developing novel tooling and creating new technology-driven creative skills it aims to bring garment manufacturing back to the UK and focuses on supporting small to medium designer manufacturers in using sustainable methods, to help reverse the fast fashion business model.

The lab is complemented by the Work in Progress Pavilion, a low-carbon timber-framed building designed by architects Bennetts Associates, offering an adaptable and functional office space, an exhibition and a lecture theatre where ROLL’s work and research can be showcased, including a robot cell for demonstrations.

Susan Postlethwaite, Professor of Fashion Technologies at MFI and Director of ROLL, said: “This launch is the culmination of years of planning, collaboration and research, and I’m delighted to showcase the important work of the lab.

“The fashion industry makes a huge contribution to the UK economy, however most of that comes from imported garments. ROLL will play a vital role in attracting the workforce back to the UK, upskilling human workers and offering world-class fashion design products that are locally manufactured.

“I believe that fashion must be taken more seriously when it comes to planning for our manufacturing future and should be included in a new industrial strategy.  By using innovative and sustainable technologies here in Manchester, ROLL will help to reshape the agenda for the creative industry.”