Design and development of an automated footwear testing system

To provide a less expensive and more consistent means of evaluating shoe performance, a project was undertaken to develop an automated footwear testing system (AFTS) to augment human subject data in athletic shoe evaluation. The objective of the AFTS project was to develop a programmable automated footwear testing system for assessing specific performance characteristics of sport shoes. To achieve this objective, the AFTS would have to emulate foot-ground interactions that accompany a variety of athletic movements including walking, running, side shuffling, and, later, stopping, cutting, and jumping. Furthermore, the machine must emulate a variety of human body weight, gender, shoe size, and running style combinations. The AFTS prototype produced valuable insight both into the future of automated footwear testing and high-performance Stewart-Gough platform design.