Robotic manipulation for the shoe-packaging process
Luis Gracia, Carlos Perez Vidal, Dennis Mronga, Jose Manuel de Paco, Jose Maria Azorin, Jose de Gea Fernandez
In International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, In International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Springer, volume 92, pages 1053-1067, Mar/2017. ISBN: DOI: 10.1007/s00170-017-0212-6.
Abstract
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This paper presents the integration of a robotic system in a human-centered environment, as it can be found in the shoe manufacturing industry. Fashion footwear is nowadays mainly handcrafted due to the big amount of small production tasks. Therefore, the introduction of intelligent robotic systems in this industry may contribute to automate and improve the manual production steps, such as polishing, cleaning, packaging, and visual inspection. Due to the high complexity of the manual tasks in shoe production, cooperative robotic systems (which can work in collaboration with humans) are required. Thus, the focus of the robot lays on grasping, collision detection, and avoidance, as well as on considering the human intervention to supervise the work being performed. For this research, the robot has been equipped with a Kinect camera and a wrist force/torque sensor so that it is able to detect human interaction and the dynamic environment in order to modify the robot’s behavior. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach, this work presents the experimental results obtained for two actual platforms, which are located at different research laboratories, that share similarities in their morphology, sensor equipment and actuation system.
Links:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00170-017-0212-6
