Toward a sustainable transition in automated production: enabling the vision-based approach and synchronous control for textile surface inspection systems

The textile and apparel industry is one of the largest industries in the world, with significant environmental and social impacts, such as manual labor in poor working conditions and resource depletion and environmental degradation due to ineffective production. As a result, there is an increasing need for sustainable practices and a transition toward a more circular and responsible industry. In this paper, we introduce the proposed approach in the context of a sustainable transition for the industrial textiles. Instead of human labor, the automated solution to detect defects is proposed for the 4.0 revolution in general and the textile industry in particular. Specifically, the mechanical design of a three-dimensional model for small- and medium-sized fabric rolls is portrayed. Some computational mechanics are created to ensure a stable mechanism and proper actuators. For acquiring accurate data and measuring the machine state, several installations, that is, a digital camera, load cell, and positioning sensor, and the layout of the light source are improved to intensify the image quality. The control theme, such as the cross-coupling controller, offers superior performance in synchronization and vibration-less motion. Lastly, the excellent detection method is provided by the convolutional neural network scheme for offline training to distinguish defects on products. Instead of a manual check or low rate of defect detection on products, the contributions of this research are as follows: (a) analyzing the mechanical design of the textile machining system in terms of dynamic characteristics; (b) implementing a smooth scheme based on motion control synchronization; and (c) integrating various strategies, including vision-based computation and control topology, to demonstrate superior performance. These results highlight that our approach can be widely adapted to address sustainability challenges not only in the textile field but also in global manufacturing practices.