A Smart Manufacturing Solution for Multi-Axis Dispenser Motion Planning in Mixed Production of Shoe Soles

Abstract

Mixed production is a practical solution to realize the idea of mass product customization. The production system needs to adapt to raw materials of product variants appearing in the production line, and thus to properly complete the manufacturing task. Such system autonomy is a core competence in smart manufacturing. This paper presents a smart manufacturing solution for shoe sole gluing in mixed production environment. The solution automatically guides a 5-axis CNC dispensing machine to perform the gluing task of a sole randomly placed on the worktable without use of fixturing. A single RGB-D camera is used to capture the color and depth data of the work environment. A two-stage algorithm is implemented to provide the intelligence required by the solution using the captured data as input. The LINEMOD method first determines a rough pose from training data of all shoe soles at pre-defined orientations. A trimmed interactive closest point (ICP) method then refines the pose using the rough one as the initial solution. Pre-determined working paths are transformed into the correct location around the sole with the refined pose. The corresponding motion commands drive the dispenser controller to complete the gluing task without collision. Test results of real shoe soles validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. This work contributes to smart manufacturing in the shoe making industry, which has been less studied in the past.