Bimanual robot manipulation and packaging of shoes in footwear industry

The present paper presents the ongoing research undertaken as a research experiment, called HERMES, inside Echord european integrated project framework. The goal of the HERMES experiment is to study, analyze and finally implement the packaging of shoes on a robot system that mimics the required degree of flexibility and dexterity provided by the human workers. The use of a bimanual system with anthropomorphic hands has been chosen as it could also be applied to solve other processes of similar or even higher complexity in the future and thus provide a holistic approach towards automization in footwear industry. In this paper, the first experimental results of the HERMES experiment are presented.