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18 March 2019, 18:47

Belarusian footwear maker Belwest to embrace robot technology

VITEBSK, 18 March (BelTA) – The Belarusian footwear manufacturer SOOO Belwest intends to start introducing industrial robots in summer in order to automate the main manufacturing operations, the company's Director General Yuri Sumaneyev told BelTA.

The company's own R&D center Latsit, which is a resident company in the Hi-Tech Park, will take care of designing and manufacturing the robots. The robots the R&D center has already made have neither prototypes nor competitors in the world, Yuri Sumaneyev stressed. Making robots for the footwear industry is complicated since footwear manufacturing requires a lot of manual labor and precise movements. The specialists have to work with natural leather, which is not a simple material to manipulate. The technologies the company has created can successfully do the job.

In particular, one of the robots, which resembles R2D2 from the Star Wars series, is equipped with computer vision and has been trained to interact with other components of the process flow in order to be able to move materials or intermediates along the conveyor belt. Dozens of trolleys will have to move between robots, which perform the main operations, while a dedicated computer center in a separate room will run them. This year the company intends to finish polishing some prototypes and deploy industrial robots step by step.

The Belarusian-Russian joint venture SOOO Belwest is one of Belarus' largest footwear manufacturers, with the installed output capacity of 2 million pairs per annum. The enterprise was established in June 1988 with assistance of the Vitebsk footwear factory Krasny Oktyabr and the German company Salamander. In late 2002 Belwest became a Belarusian-Russian joint venture. The Russian investment company Investprom owns 55% of the company's charter capital. In 2018 the company's output growth rate exceeded 107%. In 2019 the company intends to increase output by 3.2%. Footwear and leather haberdashery articles are sold via a chain of proprietary stores. The company sells about 1% of the output online but intends to step up interaction with consumers via this channel.

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