The Centre Fedit Inescop receives the meeting of the European project Robofoot
23 February 2012
The
Enter the robotics in the industry of the footwear is the aim of Robofoot, a European project in which they participate a ten of European entities, partially funded by the VII Program Mark of the European Union. Up to now the effective use of the robotics had restricted to the safety footwear and in general to industries with big volumes of production, operations very repetitive and little variation of the modelaje (automotive sector, for example).
Because of the complexity of the manufacture of fashionable footwear, that has a big quantity of variants of product and small series, has been difficult to enter to date, the technicians of manufacture robotizada. Thanks to this ambitious project, the footwear alía with the robotics with the end to automate some of the operations that at present realise of manual form. In this way, tasks like the application of adhesive, the lijado of the cut, the tintado and polishing, could happen to realise of automatic form, optimising like this the productive process.
The project, that began in September of 2010, has advanced of remarkable form. In fact, during the meeting presented the pilot plant of the cell robotizada, that the Centre Fedit Inescop is developing beside the companies To&CN and Pikolinos. Said cell, that will install in this last company to the term of the project, will realise in principle 3 operations: the application of creams on the shoe, the polishing, and the deshormado.
Likewise, the Centre Fedit Inescop will form to the integral partners of the project in the software BasicCAM, an own system developed to obtain the paths of the work of the robot on the shoe. And it is that thanks to the last developments in systems CAD in three dimensions for footwear of the Centre Fedit Inescop, is possible to execute the operations of manufacture from the use of special sensors and of the information generated in the phase of design. The newest of this software is that it will be possible to modify the paths of the robot during his work in real time, to adapt to the geometrical ‘peculiarities' of each shoe, breaking like this with one of the main barriers to the hour of robotizar the industry of the footwear.
Robofoot Is formed by a consortium of companies and centres of investigation of Spain, Italy and Germany, between which find the Centre Fedit Inescop, the Technological Centres Tekniker-IK4, CNR-ITIA and DFKI, the industrial companies To&CN, Comau, QDesign and the companies manufacturers of footwear Pikolinos and Rotta.
