A vision guided robot for gluing operations

The paper describes the development of an automatic machine to be adopted to glue the shoe upper to its sole or to glue a rubber insert on the lower surface of the sole. The machine prototype consists in a cartesian robot that drives a glue gun and by a vision system that can recognize the sole, placed on a worktop, allowing the planning of the glue gun trajectory. After a description of the machine hardware assembly, the developed procedures that allows the sole recognition and the robot planning trajectories are presented. Finally, the results of several tests, performed to check the procedure goodness, are reporte