Design and fabrication of precise shoe-upper feeder system for screen printing machine in shoe industry

Abstract

The feeding stage of sport shoe-upper for automatic screen printing machine for printing press-segments on shoe-upper exists the following issues: Firstly, the locating shoe-uppers on the conveyor of screen printing machine is made ​​by hand and based on the experience of workers. So, this reduces productivity and increases the cost of the product. Secondly, there are deviations of the press-segments on shoe-upper after printing (the current deviation is ± 1 mm). So, these are affected to the next stage of sewing contour lines on the shoe-upper. Currently, the shoe manufacturing company in Vietnam wish solve these problems, but so far, in addition to resolve manually there is no feasible method has been given.

In this paper, a precise position control of shoe-upper for screen printing machine using image processing techniques is introduced. A camera is used to capture the image of shoe-upper. The binary image of shoe-upper is used for image processing to recognize the position errors in directions of X, Y and θ coordinates. A new algorithm to calculate the position errors of shoe-upper is proposed in this paper. The shoe-upper is locating on X-Y-θ tables which can move X, Y directions and rotating θ angle. These tables are controlled by three servo motors. The mission of X-Y-θ tables are adjustable positioning accuracy of the shoes-upper by comparing the current position with its standard position that has been previously stored in the computer. The effectiveness of the calculation algorithm of shoe-upper errors and the high accuracy of image processing and mechanical system are proven through experimental results