A Study on Development of Off-Line Path Programming for Footwear Buffing Robot

We suggest how to program off-line robot path along shoes' outsole shape in the footwear buffing process by a 5-axis microscribe system like robot arms. This microscribe system developed consists a 5-axis robot link with a turn table, signal processing circuit, PC and an application software program. It makes a robot path on the shoe's upper through the movement of a microscribe with many joints. To do this, first it reads 5-encoder's pulse values while a robot arm points a shoes' outsole shape from the initial status. This system developed calculates the encoder pulse values for the robot arm's rotation and transmits the angle pulse values to the PC through a circuit. Then, Denavit-Hartenberg's(D-H) direct kinematics is used to make the global coordinate from robot joint one. The determinant is obtained with kinematics equation and D-H variable representation. To drive the kinematics equation, we have to set up the standard coordinates first. The many links and the more complicated structure cause the difficult kinematics problem to solve in the geometrical way. Thus, we can solve the robot's kinematics problems efficiently and systematically by Denavit-Hartenberg's representation. Finally, with the coordinate values calculated above, it can draw a buffing gauge-line on the upper. Also, it can program off-line robot path on the shoes' upper. We are subjected to obtaining shoes' outline points, which are 2 outlines coupled with the points and the normal vector based on the points. These data is supposed to be transformed into .dxf file to be used for data of automatic buffing robot. This system developed is simulated by using spline curves coupled with each point from dxf file in Autocad. As a result of applying this system to the buffing robot in the flexible footwear manufacturing system, it can be used effectively to program the path of a real buffing robot.