Computer-Controlled 3D Freeform Surface Weaving

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of fabricating precisely shaped 3D freeform surfaces using woven structures made from high bending-stiffness threads. It introduces a complete hardware-software platform, including a Jacquard-enabled partial-weaving scheme, a warp-beam matrix for per-thread length control, a novel weaving mechanism, and dual-robotic weft tightening, all orchestrated by a geodesic-field–based computational pipeline that converts a 3D surface into W-code. The authors demonstrate a working prototype and validate it on multiple freeform shapes using cotton, conductive, and optical-thread materials, achieving sub-millimeter shape accuracy and preserved thread continuity. This work enables automatic fabrication of functional 3D woven surfaces suitable for applications in soft electronics, wearables, and smart textiles, and provides a scalable computational map-to-code workflow for future development.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new computer-controlled weaving technology that enables the fabrication of woven structures in the shape of given 3D surfaces by using threads in non-traditional materials with high bending-stiffness, allowing for multiple applications with the resultant woven fabrics. A new weaving machine and a new manufacturing process are developed to realize the function of 3D surface weaving by the principle of short-row shaping. A computational solution is investigated to convert input 3D freeform surfaces into the corresponding weaving operations (indicated as W-code) to guide the operation of this system. A variety of examples using cotton threads, conductive threads and optical fibres are fabricated by our prototype system to demonstrate its functionality.

Figures (22)

• Figure 1: An illustrations of woven structures using non-traditional materials with high bending-stiffness, which can neither be realized by the knitting process (i.e., highly bent loops are formed) nor the felting process (i.e., none woven structure is formed). The width $s_w$ of a woven structure is determined by the mechanical components as reed and the height $s_h$ can be controlled by the motors & gears of warp beams.
• Figure 2: Given the 3D surface of a vest's front piece, the 3D woven structures (c) are formed by controlling (a) the lengths of warp threads in different columns -- e.g., $W_i$ and $W_j$ have different lengths and (b) the different starting / ending positions of the weft thread to form short rows -- see the regions circled by dash lines. Fabricating the 3D woven structures is supervised by a weaving map as shown in (d). The result of fabrication by cotton threads are shown in (e, f) with red for warp threads and blue for weft threads.
• Figure 3: Our computer-controlled 3D weaving system can fabricate woven structures to form a target 3D surface shape and it mainly consists of four hardware parts: 1) jacquard device, 2) warp beams, 3) weaving mechanism, and 4) shuttle moving mechanism. The weaving process can be completed automatically with the help of two robotic arms equipped with camera together with a camera mounted above the weaving region. The weaving result as a hemisphere with embedded optical fibres is shown in the right-upper corner.
• Figure 4: The jacquard device (a, b) contains 13 components to lift the selected warp threads under computer control. The parsing motions of two heddle lifters with dropping and lifting commands are shown as: (c) the initial state, (d) the hanging-up state, and (e) the lifted state.
• Figure 5: Each warp beam is compounded of a frame ⓐ, a coil of warp thread ⓑ, a motor ⓒ, and a pair of driving gears ⓓ and ⓔ.