Research on the path extraction method of shoe upper grinding based on 3D vision

Abstract Shoe upper grinding is a crucial step in the shoe manufacturing process, impacting both the bonding quality between the sole and the upper and the overall appearance of the shoe. Presently, many shoe companies rely on manual or semi-automated grinding methods for shoe uppers, resulting in low production efficiency and subpar grinding quality. This study proposes a 3D vision-based shoe upper grinding path extraction method for guiding a robotic arm to polish the shoe upper and address this issue. Initially, the RGB-D camera was used to obtain the point cloud data of the shoe surface, which was then preprocessed using point cloud filtering, smoothing and registration methods. Second, by combining RGB images with 3D point clouds, we propose a point-cloud region of interest (ROI) extraction method based on RGB information to obtain the feature point cloud of the shoe upper grinding line. Finally, we slice the feature point cloud of the shoe upper grinding line, extract the grinding points using an intersection algorithm, and fit them with a non-uniform rational B-spline curve (NURBS) to obtain the shoe’s upper grinding path. The research demonstrates that this method can effectively extract the shoe upper grinding trajectory curve, significantly reduce the time required to obtain the shoe upper grinding trajectory, and achieve good accuracy, with promising application prospects.