Assembling non-rigid products in the shoe industry

The assembly of shoe uppers is a labour intensive activity requiring highly developed manipulative and supervisory skills to ensure economical production of adequate quality. A typical manufacturing unit in the fashion sector might at any instant have in process-say 20-40 or more shoe styles, each one comprising left and right, each with ten sizes and perhaps as many as twenty components in the upper alone. Clearly, any form of automation depending upon hard tooling is unacceptable in such an environment. Tool changes are too frequent and the cost and logistics of providing and managing the tooling hardware are prohibitive. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and machinery based on such technology is successful when production runs are long enough. Over the last ten years British United Shoe Machinery Ltd. (BUSM) and a number of universities have collaborated in a project to identify and demonstrate automation technologies of sufficient flexibility to be applicable to a broader range of shoe making environments. This involves computer vision