초록
Custom-tailored products always vary their sizes and shapes to satisfy the customers' tastes and requirements but they have to be fabricated as fast as possible when ordered. One way to solve this problem is to prepare several representative products in advance and each custom-tailored product is generated by machining the closest representative product. To realize this approach, it would be necessary to be able to group the products into several groups each of which has a representative product. Once the similar products are identified to be grouped, the representative shape can be generated such that all the products in the group can be made by machining the representative product. The custom-tailored products considered in this work have similar shapes but different sizes. Since these products have free surfaces, that are hard to be compared, their convex hulls are used for the grouping. Among all the products to be grouped, one product is chosen as a base shape. The shape and overall similarity values between the base shape and the remaining shapes are calculated as their convex hulls are rotated virtually. By calculating these similarity values at each rotation, the optimal alignment of the reference shape with respect to the base shape is determined. Overall similarity value at this optimal alignment is used as a measure for grouping. A prototype system based on the proposed methodology has been implemented and used to group the shoe-lasts for custom-tailored shoes.