The SABOT and IRIST projects involve a broad European consortia of shoemakers, shoe-industry research associations and other research organisations, including academia and companies such as AOS, from the UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The overall aim of both projects, which attracted co-funding from the European Union, was the improvement of the shoe-making process, by improving quality thereby reducing early failures, customer dissatisfaction, wastage of materials and cost.

The key area addressed by both projects was shoe-bottoming, where the lasted upper is adhesively-bonded to the sole unit. The failure of this bond is the single biggest problem in modern shoemaking and accounts for the vast majority of customer returns. The results of the SABOT project indicated that surface preparation had the most significant effect on the integrity of the bond. Most shoemakers use either rotating wire brushes, or abrasive wheels, to roughen the leather surface before the adhesive is applied. This is a very difficult process to carry out however, and the lack of reliable on-line sensing means that it is impossible to automate satisfactorily.


The IRIST project, is seeking to demonstrate an alternative surface preparation technique, in which the upper material is removed by grit-blasting under closed loop control. The project addresses the two key questions; where to remove material and how much material to remove? The former requires a knowledge of the topology of the lasted upper and sole (which has to be acquired on a workpiece by workpiece basis, because of manufacturing tolerances) and the latter a means of detecting material removal on-line. AOS is extensively involved in both of these aspects, especially in the design and manufacture of vision and other optical sensor systems.