A Conformal Mapping Approach for Shoe Last Design

Customized shoe making is receiving increased interest from shoe manufacturers as a solution to alleviate the growing burdens associated with foot problems. Design of shoe "lasts" is a central activity in customized shoe manufacture and is traditionally based on bare eyes and skilful hands. This results in errors in the design of lasts and, in recent years, the free form deformation (FFD) was introduced that utilizes a restricted number of control points to transform the 3D foot data into 3D last data. However this scheme does not provide the design method for the major dimensions of the last. To overcome this problem a new method for last design was developed that takes the three dimensional foot data and carries out its analysis using LFFD and the Schwarz-Christoffel algorithm but which improves this further by means of a conformal mapping function in terms of accuracy over the conventional last design. Further research is needed to assess the practicalities and its industrial application in shoe manufacture.