Fabric in Flight: Highly Reconfigurable Fabric Testing Station

High-fidelity characterisation of flexible fabric sheets remains a bottleneck for digital–twin development in the composites and technical textiles in industries such as aerospace manufacturing. We introduce a magnetic-levitation test station built on Beckhoff’s XPlanar planar-motor system, augmented with an array of vertical actuators. Independently driven six-DoF movers apply programmable in-plane loads, simultaneously, the actuator array can impose out-of-plane deformations. Embedded force and position sensing, as well as synchronised RGB-D imaging, deliver rich datasets suitable for modern machine-learning workflows. Platform validation experiments show the on-board force measurements agree with a reference load cell with very high correlation. Repeated trials on cotton fabrics yield point clouds with very low chamfer distances between trials, confirming geometric repeatability and the ability to resolve material-specific behaviour. The test setup can provide rich, reproducible datasets of real-world materials important for accelerating and improving the accuracy of data-driven cloth modelling and closed-loop composite manufacturing.