Robots for automation in the shoe industry
To introduce robotics into the production process to improve the competitiveness of the European shoe industry.
Robotised solutions in a series of operations that are currently performed manually.
Shoe manufacture is fundamentally manual. There are several reasons to explain this characteristic, such as the large amount of variants, the complexity of manufacturing, assembly and packing, as well as the nature of the materials used.
In this case, new ways of handling non-rigid products have been investigated, that is to say, new handling strategies and devices that allow the gripping, handling and packaging of shoes without damaging them.
Also, work has been undertaken on control strategies and methods for programming the most usable robots on the market in the use of information provided by sensors, particularly that of visual control and force control as the basis for the generation and adjustment of trajectories in real time.
Lastly, work has been done on redesigning some of the shoe production processes to make robot-assisted assembly and manufacture viable, specifically, the sanding, gluing, staining, polishing, de-moulding, manufacturing of shoe trees, visual inspection and packaging.