Robotic cell for custom finishing operations

Finishing operations in the shoe manufacturing process comprises operations such as application of polishing wax, polishing cream and spray solvents, and brushing in order to achieve high gloss. These operations require skilled workers and are generally difficult to automate owing to the complex motion trajectories. This paper describes a robotic cell for finishing operations in a custom shoe production plant. Such customization of shoe production should allow production of small batches of shoes of the same type. This requires automatic set-up and adaptation of the production line. To meet these requirements, a computer aided design (CAD) system for automatic generation, optimization and validation of motion trajectories was integrated into a robotic cell. In automatic trajectory generation some of the major problems are limitations posed by the robot joint limits, robot singularities and environment obstacles. These problems were solved using the kinematic redundancy of the robot manipulator.