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Robotic manipulation for the shoe-packaging process

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Abstract

This paper presents the integration of a robotic system in a human-centered environment, as it can be found in the shoe manufacturing industry. Fashion footwear is nowadays mainly handcrafted due to the big amount of small production tasks. Therefore, the introduction of intelligent robotic systems in this industry may contribute to automate and improve the manual production steps, such us polishing, cleaning, packaging, and visual inspection. Due to the high complexity of the manual tasks in shoe production, cooperative robotic systems (which can work in collaboration with humans) are required. Thus, the focus of the robot lays on grasping, collision detection, and avoidance, as well as on considering the human intervention to supervise the work being performed. For this research, the robot has been equipped with a Kinect camera and a wrist force/ torque sensor so that it is able to detect human interaction and the dynamic environment in order to modify the robot’s behavior. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach, this work presents the experimental results obtained for two actual platforms, which are located at different research laboratories, that share similarities in their morphology, sensor equipment and actuation system.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partly supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (Key No.: 0201603139 of Invest in Spain program and Grant No. RTC-2016-5408-6) and by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) of the German Government (Projekt-ID 54368155).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto IDF, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Luis Gracia

  2. Miguel Hernandez University (UMH), Elche, Spain

    Carlos Perez-Vidal & Jose-Maria Azorin

  3. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Bremen, Germany

    Dennis Mronga & Jose de Gea

  4. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, Geneve, Switzerland

    Jose-Manuel de Paco

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  1. Luis Gracia
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  2. Carlos Perez-Vidal
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  3. Dennis Mronga
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  4. Jose-Manuel de Paco
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  5. Jose-Maria Azorin
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  6. Jose de Gea
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Correspondence to Luis Gracia.

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Gracia, L., Perez-Vidal, C., Mronga, D. et al. Robotic manipulation for the shoe-packaging process. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 92, 1053–1067 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-017-0212-6

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