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MANUFACTURING & MATERIALS INNOVATION
R
obots are becoming a
common topic in discussions
about
modern
shoe
manufacturing, both for their
current applications and for the
potential ones they may provide for our
sector in the future. Their presence as
ancillary equipment in direct sole
moulding systems has relieved human
operators from many repetitive and
potentially dangerous tasks, with a
great contribution in the improvement
of the quality and reliability of the
whole process.
Desma
and
Main
Group
Technologies, as leading companies in
this sector, have shown the degree to
which the adoption of these versatile
machines can be taken and have
demonstrated their capabilities in a
series of original applications, both
directly integrated with injection
carousels or as autonomous cells
performing upstream and downstream
tasks in the injection process.
In a special article last year we also
described how robots can be combined
in innovative ways to create complex
setups
or
robotised
footwear
manufacturing lines, showing how
these machines, together with other
automatic devices controlled by
appropriate software applications to
manage and supervise manufacturing
operations and in combination with
advanced RFID tracking systems, can
transform the typical layout of a shoe
factory to completely change its
manufacturing approach.
As a further support for these
concepts,
The Economist
, in an April
2012 issue, published an extensive
survey of what the magazine called the
‘third industrial revolution’ that, in the
authors’ opinion, is due to change
dramatically the way manufacturing
will be done in future. Their view is that
one particular effect among many
others would be that manufacturing
would be brought back to industrialised
countries, a trend this magazine has
also been monitoring as witnessed by
another article in this current issue.
The Economist
sees the roots of this
revolution in three concomitant
technological advances. First, there is
the progressive ‘digitisation’ of
manufacturing as in the ever growing
role that ICT technologies are gaining in
virtually all phases of product design
and manufacture. Second, there are the
further advances and widespread
diffusion of direct manufacturing
technologies with their implicit
flexibility and versatility. Finally, there is
process automation with a particular
reference to the new generation of
robots under development. This is a
vision that we definitely share, having
mentioned robots among the five
technological revolutions that changed
the world of shoe technology in the last
18
WORLD FOOTWEAR | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012
The EUROShoe project of the early 2000s demonstrated the real potential for robotics in footwear manufacture.
CREDIT: SERGIO DULIO
An update on
footwear robotics
SERGIO DULIO