This insanely fast robot will make Adidas shirts cheaper – and kill hundreds of jobs

A robotic sewing system will soon produce hundreds of thousands of shirts for Adidas, which could potentially change textile manufacture.

The machine — called a “Sewbot” uses cameras and bots to cut and sew the soft fabric, a task which has eluded other forms of automation. Until now, the task was still best-suited to humans with sewing machines. According to Softwear:

The machines use a combination of cameras and needles to track the placement of a fabric before sewing the apparel at a reported higher level of accuracy than the human eye.

Here’s what the Sewbot looks like in action, making a pair of jeans:

The bot itself comes from Atlanta-based company SoftWear Automation, which was awarded a $1.25 million DARPA contract in 2012 specifically to develop the technology. Chinese company Tianyuan Garments will use the bot at its plant in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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Tang Xinhong, chairman of Tianyuan, said:

We will install 21 production lines. When fully operational, the system will make one T-shirt every 22 seconds. We will produce 800,000 T-shirts a day for Adidas … Around the world, even the cheapest labor market can’t compete with us. I am really excited about this.

This is a boon for domestic clothing manufacture, and it could mean that clothes — from Adidas, at least — are about to get a whole lot cheaper. It’ll also likely mean that thousands of people are about to lose their jobs.

If a robot can make that many shirts for a major company daily, what will that do to the economies based around textile work?