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twenty-five years as profiled in the
July/August 25th Anniversary issue of
World Footwear
.
STEP BY STEP TOWARDS
THE FUTURE
The sector that sees the largest
diffusion for robots in shoe
manufacturing is injection moulding,
with all its various differentiations
including all plastic shoes and boots,
and direct or indirect sole moulding.
Conventional shoes, with the typical
lasted upper and cemented outsole
construction, are still to take full
advantage of these machines, although
indications of increased attention by
both technology suppliers and the
manufacturers of this type of footwear
are there to be seen.
Robot-based bottom roughing and
cementing cells (including the
innovative system developed by Desma
that uses lasers to perform the
roughing operation) or outsole
cementing cells are examples of this
and represent an effective cross-
fertilisation between different sectors
of the footwear world. There are
nevertheless operations that have
always been considered too delicate or
demanding to be performed by robots
and for which human operators were
considered, at least until today, as
indispensable. In talking about the
most recent advances in the use of
robots for shoemaking we will give two
examples of innovative applications.
Interestingly enough, they refer to
processing steps at the two extremes of
the manufacturing sequence, upper
lasting and shoe finishing.
AUTOMATED LASTING
Upper lasting, as we all know, is a
crucial step in making a conventional,
non-injected shoe. The operation is split
into two separate phases; lasting the
front part of the upper (toe or forepart
lasting) followed by a second step in
which the remaining part of the upper is
pulled over the last and cemented
and/or tacked to the insole (seat and
side lasting). These operations are
typically performed with state of the art,
electronically controlled machines with
full programming capabilities. While
there is no doubt that toe lasting
requires the skill of a highly experienced
operator, there have always been
discussions as to whether seat and side
lasting
could
be
done
fully
automatically by the machine itself,
with no contribution from an operator.
In principle, provided some important
preconditions are fulfilled such as
careful and accurate toe or forepart
lasting, the use of high quality
components (in particular a precisely
built insole) are followed and the
machine is well programmed, the latest
generation of machines can perform the
task almost by themselves. The
operator will only need to load the shoe
into the machine and select the
appropriate lasting program from its
memory. Here are two tasks we can
think of automating completely, thus
obtaining a global reduction in the
number of workers employed in the
lasting section of the making room.
This would need a programmable
machine and an automated system
where the operator of the toe lasting
machine takes the shoe from the
machine at the end of the lasting
sequence and places it on an exchange
station. The robot picks it and uploads it
onto the seat and side lasting machine
and then unloads it at the end of that
sequence. A first attempt to prove the
feasibility of this approach was made in
the EUROShoe project, in which a
modified Molina e Bianchi machine was
fully integrated in an original
manipulation and transportation
system, allowing it to work unattended.
More recently a different approach was
used in the IDEAFoot research project,
where an off-the-shelf ABB robot takes
the role of the operator in tending the
machine.
This EU-financed research project
was led BZ Moda, a shoe company in
the Riviera del Brenta district of Italy,
that clearly indicated the kind of
footwear targeted by the project: high
quality, high fashion ladies shoes. It
involved a considerable number of
technology
suppliers
including
Politecnico Calzaturiero and Brustia
Alfameccanica from Italy, Spanish
research institute INESCOP, Desma
from Germany which supplied a large
part of manufacturing cell and the
research institutions University of
Padua and ITIA – CNR in Milan. The goal
of the project was to develop an
automated production line that was
versatile enough to handle shoes with
cement sole attaching and featuring
different styles, uppers and heel heights
ranging from simple ballerinas to high
heel boots. As a prerequisite, the seat
and side lasting machine was designed
to operate unattended with a robot to
replace the operator for the loading and
unloading tasks.
The shoemaking line is currently
undergoing an intensive phase of
production tests at the BZ Moda factory.
A top-of-the-range seat and side lasting
machine from Brustia Alfameccanica
was extensively modified both
mechanically and electronically. The
front assembly was redesigned to
introduce additional movements so as
to assist the robot in passing the shoe to
be processed to the machine itself. Its
19
AN UPDATE ON FOOTWEAR ROBOTICS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012 | www.footwearbiz.com
Seat and side lasting machine with attendant robot for loading and unloading the shoe.
CREDITS: BZ MODA