A grouping algorithm for custom-tailored products

This paper proposes the new grouping method, which is necessary to fabricate the custom-tailored products quickly. The custom-tailored products considered in this work have similar shapes but different sizes. Because these products have free surfaces, that are hard to compare, their convex hulls are used for the grouping process. Among all the products to be grouped, one product is chosen as the base part. The shape and overall similarity values between the base part and the remaining parts are calculated by virtual rotation of their convex hulls. By calculating their similarity values at each rotation, the optimal alignment of the query part with respect to the base part is determined. The overall similarity value at this optimal alignment is then used as a measure for grouping. A prototype system based on the proposed methodology has been implemented and used to group the shoe-lasts for custom-tailored shoes.