Robotics Living Lab, 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 £3.8 million (~$4.79 million) 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.
The UK’s first fashion manufacturing lab, Robotics Living Lab (RoLL), has opened at Manchester Met’s Fashion Institute.
RoLL features collaborative robots (cobots) that can stitch, knit, and prototype garments, enabling sustainable, low-volume production.
It aims to modernise fashion manufacturing, address the industry’s skills shortage, and support re-shoring.
The cobot arms have potential to stitch, draw, knit, and even 3D scan a mannequin or human body before prototyping a garment design.
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, MFI said on its website.
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.
“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,” Susan Postlethwaite, professor of fashion technologies at MFI and director of RoLL, said.
“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,” concluded Postlethwaite.