Sholder : A Motorized Automatic Shirt Folding Machine

Sammanfattning: In today’s fast-paced society, there is a high demand for faster and more effective ways of dealing with chores and other time-consuming activities, but while appliances like washing machines and dishwashers have become standard use, there has been limited progress in making the tedious task of folding clothes easier. This bachelor's thesis project in Mechatronics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology details the design, construction and performance of a motorized automatic shirt folding machine that can fold both T-shirts and long-sleeve shirts. The machine executes folds by operating eight different flaps in a certain sequence. It can autonomously detect if the shirt placed by the user is a T-shirt or a long-sleeve and then execute the folding sequence accordingly. The machine was tested against manual folding performed by three different people. It was concluded that, although the machine was slower at folding a set of 10 T-shirts and 10 thinner long-sleeves by 1.93 and 1.14 seconds respectively, it had greater folding precision and reliability. It also had repeatability issues and succeeded in folding only 21/30 long-sleeve shirts; a success rate of 70%. The performance of the machine could, for instance, be improved by adjusting the dimensions of the flaps to optimize crease positioning. Upgrading to higher torque servo motors is another viable approach. Additionally, exchanging the manually cut D-shafts, which operate two of the flaps, to pre-manufactured D-shafts can effectively reduce play between shafts and couplings.