Name: Robots Are Stringing Together These Adidas Running Shoes
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Robots Are Stringing Together These Adidas Running Shoes

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three years, the world of running has been obsessed with one technology: carbon-fiber plates. The springy plates that help to push runners forward are now used by in their top-end shoes. But as sports companies have raced to embed the , the foot-hugging fabric material that sits on the top of trainers has been neglected.WIRED UKThis story originally appeared on .That is, until now. has revealed that for the last four years its computer and sports scientists have been secretly working on a brand new way to create a shoe’s upper. Called "Futurecraft.Strung," the technology sees a robot quickly place more than a thousand individual threads at mind-bending angles across the material part of the shoe.To create this stringy canvas, the company built custom robotics and software, and conducted high-resolution scans of how runners’ feet move as they travel. For its prototype shoe (above) to demonstrate the tech, Adidas combined the new material process with a 3D-printed sole to create one of the brand's most advanced shoes to date.While the Strung fabric will initially be used in running shoes—the first versions won’t be available until late 2021 or even 2022—the company is already looking at how the new process can be used across other products it makes.“There have basically been two ways to make a textile: there's weaving, and there's knitting,” says Fionn Corcoran-Tadd, an innovation designer at Adidas’ Futurecraft lab, where Strung was created. The lab most recently made and . Andrea Nieto, also an innovation designer, adds: “We can work and place yarns in any direction, allowing us to create a dynamic textile.”If the shoe’s upper material looks a little chaotic, that’s because it is. Traditional fabric manufacturing usually only allows for threads to be placed horizontally or vertically. For instance, Nike’s Flyknit technology is fashioned by knitting small squares. The patterns in the material are often repeated.Strung turns this on its head. The upper has multiple layers of individual threads placed across the shoe. Yarns are placed at all different angles—although not at random. The gaps between the threads vary, and the threads can all be tuned to have different properties, the team behind the technology says.Most Popular“There’s a thread that's only used in the heel region,” Corcoran-Tadd says, “because it's by far the stiffest thread that we use in the upper. That was the area where we needed to create the most support without much stretch.” Whereas across the middle of the foot, towards the toes, there are fewer threads, as there doesn’t need to be as much support for that part of the foot. Plus, fewer threads means greater breathability. Look closely and there are visible gaps in the upper.“Even though you have, maybe, a stretchable yarn running all the way from the front to the back of the shoe, in different sections it fulfils different purposes, or combined with the other threads creates different properties,” Clemens Dyckmans, a senior manager of future technology creation at Adidas says. The company is indeed experimenting with different thread materials and has a variety of threads that have different properties. “Some behave almost like a rubber band and some are more like a steel wire.”The design is based on data, with humans tweaking and adding extra expertise to the process. Corcoran-Tadd says behavioral data (such as details about how fast people are running and the conditions they’re running in) is combined with data about the foot’s movement to help position where each of the threads should go.The designers say they’re not handing over total control to the machine, though. The modeling software they’ve created allows the system to imagine several types of different thread structures that can then be tweaked and adapted to best fit the purpose of the trainer. The prototype shoe was designed for people running in cities at high speeds.The Adidas team says it modifies suggestions that are built around the data, adding human experience, such as how comfortable the shoe is, and will go into the software and “manipulate” individual threads or groupings of threads. They don’t draw out all the threads manually, though.Most PopularThe data-driven approach can result in suggestions that may not be the natural response for human designers. “A lot of the decisions are human-made and very much informed by data,” Corcoran-Tadd says. “Even now, though, you'll see things that maybe are not intuitive, not something that you would understand by looking at this problem. There's definitely times where we're kind of caught out.”Just as humans can’t plot out the exact best position for threads to be placed, the manufacturing process is one that people can’t complete either. During the earliest prototypes of the Strung technology, Adidas staffers say they spent entire days hand-placing threads to see if their idea could work. This, obviously, wasn’t scalable.“The unique opportunity of Strung is that a robot is doing something that a human is not capable of,” Dyckmans says. The robot, which has 10 different spools of thread attached to it, is able to feed these through a central threading system and then automatically create the upper from the digital designs.Each upper made with Strung technology is in a single piece. There are no flaps or sections that need to be joined together with other processes. The team behind Strung say the machine is capable of producing a complete upper in a matter of minutes, and the uppers it has made for the prototype shoe it just revealed weigh only 35 grams each.This methodology means it’s easy to test new designs with different thread positioning. But it also has the benefit of being able to produce shoes at scale. When the first shoes using Strung technology go on sale, Adidas says it will need fewer than 10 robots to manufacture the quantities it is planning on producing.“It's more precise than the human, it's faster than the human, and therefore it has its place,” Dyckmans adds. “You can leave the room. You can do 10 at a time, and just run it.”This story originally appeared on .More Great WIRED Stories is a senior writer at WIRED focused on information security, privacy, and data regulation in Europe. He graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in journalism and now lives in London. Send tips to .

three years, the world of running has been obsessed with one technology: carbon-fiber plates. The springy plates that help to push runners forward are now used by in their top-end shoes. But as sports companies have raced to embed the , the foot-hugging fabric material that sits on the top of trainers has been neglected.WIRED UKThis story originally appeared on .That is, until now. has revealed that for the last four years its computer and sports scientists have been secretly working on a brand new way to create a shoe’s upper. Called "Futurecraft.Strung," the technology sees a robot...

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Robots Are Stringing Together These Adidas Running Shoes

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