A Feasibility Study of a Robotic Approach for the Gluing Process in the Footwear Industry

Manufacturing processes in the shoe industry are still characterized to a large extent by human labour, especially in small and medium craft enterprises. Even when machinery is adopted to support manufacturing operations, in most cases an operator has to supervise or carry out the task. On the other hand, craft footwear industries are called to respond to continuous challenges to face the globalization effects, so that a rapid adaptability to customer needs is required. The industry 4.0 paradigms, which are taking place in the industrial environments, represent an excellent opportunity to improve the efficiency and quality of production, and a way to face international competitors. This paper analyses and proposes a robotic cell to automatize the process of glue deposition on shoe upper, which exploits a new means of depositing the glue compared to State-of-Art applications. While the latter mainly adopt glue gun spraying systems or pneumatic syringes, the proposed robotic cell is based on an extrusion system for the deposition of molten material originally in the form of a filament, similar to all extent to those adopted for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). Two cell solutions are designed and tested. In the former the extruder is the robot end effector and the shoe upper is grounded to the cell frame. In the second, being the reciprocal, the shoe last is clamped to the robot wrist and the extruder is fixed to the cell frame. The peculiarities of the two solutions are pointed out and compared in terms of cell layout, hardware, programming software and possibility to develop collaborative applications. A self developed slicing software allows designing the trajectories for glue deposition based on the CAD model of the shoe upper, also allowing driving the inclination of the extruder nozzle with respect to the vectors normal to the upper surface. Both the proposed cell layouts permit to achieve good quality and production times. The solution with the mobile extruder is able to deposit glue at highest end-effector speed (up to 200 mm/s). On the other hand, the solution with the mobile shoe upper and fixed extruder seems to be more appropriate to enhance collaborative applications.

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