While technology and robotics has rapidly evolved in everything from automobile manufacturing to hog butchering, the world’s US$1.5 trillion garment industry remains relatively untouched.

While there is now computer controlled cutting for some garments, the only solution practiced around handling mass quantitates of textiles has been to chase cheap, often-exploited, labour around the world.

However, according to Atlanta, Georgia’s SoftWear Automation, this is no longer the case. While its machines are first taking on the T-shirt industry, the entire trillion-plus dollar garment industry must be wondering if this is the future?

SoftWear Automation was launched in 2012 at Georgia Tech ATDC with funding from DARPA & Georgia Research Alliance with the vision to use advanced robotics to fully automate sewn products and reimagine supply chains.

After nine years of R&D in collaboration with Georgia Tech, DARPA, and the WalMart Foundation along with three rounds of private venture capital,  SoftWear Automation’s fully autonomous Sewbot worklines enable sewn goods manufacturing locally at scale, moving supply chains closer to the customer while creating higher quality sewn products at a competitive cost.

Now, according to SoftWear CEO Palaniswamy Rajan, “We want to make a billion T-shirts a year in the USA, all made on demand.”

While according to the company’s website, it is full-steam ahead and they are just waiting for your orders, Wired says it is more difficult than that.

To make clothes fully by automation has been a challenge due to textiles bunching and stretching as they’re worked with. Human hands can handle this constantly changing fabric, robots are not.

While SoftWear says that its robotics have overcome these hurdles, according to Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, to make T-shirts as cheaply as human workers will be the challenge.