We propose a method to alter the tensile properties of cloth in a user defined and purposeful manner with the help of computer controlled embroidery. Our system is capable of infusing non-uniform stiffening in local regions of the cloth.
This has numerous applications in the manufacturing of high performance smart textiles for the medical industry, sports goods, comfort-wear, etc where pressure needs to be redistributed and the cloth needs to deform correctly under a given load. We make three contributions to accomplish this: a decomposition scheme that expresses user-desired stiffness as a density map and a directional map, a novel stitch planning algorithm that produces a series of stitches adhering to the input stiffness maps and an inverse design based optimization driven by a cloth simulator that automatically computes stiffness maps based on user specified performance criteria. We perform multiple tests on physically manufactured cloth samples to show how embroidery affects the resultant fabric to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach
