Cloth Sorting

Efficient recycling and reuse of used textiles is essential for a sustainable economy. The currently applied manual textile sorting is a time-, cost- and resource-intensive process. Thus, the idea to develop T3S, a system for automated separation and sorting of textiles, was born. Visual quality analysis of spread textiles is intended to increase the efficiency of the previously manual sorting process and ensure consistently high sorting quality. At the same time, the locally performed work step can reduce costs for sorting.
Expensive, slow and resource-intensive manual textile sorting is replaced by this automated sorting process. Computer vision and robotics are used to separate textiles and automatically determine their product category, quality and material. Larger textiles are spread out, while smaller textiles can be detected in free fall. Both the mechanical spreading and the classification in free fall set us apart from other automation solutions. Technical challenges in the funded project are the further development of AI and robotics to cover all product categories as well as the development of a novel material recognition.