Multimaterial Footbed flexible milling system - control software

The result addresses the control software in charge of governing the production system for flexible insole manufacturing, capable of managing different zones of hardness in the final product with multi-material assembling by synchronizing the production on several parallel machines. The control software for the system operation runs on a PC-based architecture. The design of the footbed is therefore first decomposed into various parts of different material, by means of a Rhinoceros plugin software internally developed. Each part is then processed to allow to build the tool paths, according to the different machine on which it will be manufactured. Once the different paths have been obtained, the dedicated software of each machine takes care of interpreting and preparing the setpoint for the realization of the individual pieces. The system is based on a Linux-rtai architecture to send the setpoints to the machine drives in real-time. Great attention is paid to allow to perform all the necessary calculations within the dedicated tasks. The setpoints thus generated are then sent via the EtherCAT real-time fieldbus to allow perfect synchronization between axes and guarantee the necessary precision for the production process. Once the parts are complete, the footbed assemble starts. The speed of realization of the whole product is guaranteed by parallelizing the operation on different machines The process is iterated as many times as needed based on the different materials to be assembled. The use of a 5-axis machine for the final finishing excludes any further manual processing step.