Apparatus and systems disclosed herein are designed to be used to study various forces acting on an athletic field or an athletic surface caused by the interaction between a shoe and the turf or athletic surface during a simulated impact. Various surfaces can be tested and analyzed, including assessing deceleration, acceleration and cutting traction potential on the surfaces. The disclosed apparatuses and systems allow for the testing of a wide variety of footwear, at any desired impact angle, and at various simulated forces.

Apparatus and systems disclosed herein are designed to be used to study various forces acting on an athletic field or an athletic surface caused by the interaction between a shoe and the turf or athletic surface during a simulated impact. Various surfaces can be tested and analyzed, including assessing deceleration, acceleration and cutting traction potential on the surfaces. The disclosed apparatuses and systems allow for the testing of a wide variety of footwear, at any desired impact angle, and at various simulated forces.

System, apparatus, articles of manufacture and methods useful for determining an approximate amount of one or more ingredients of wear material released from the wear portion of an item that wears during use of the item involve the use of a material release tracker that is associated with the wear portion and which can be used to estimate the amount of one or more ingredients released from the wear portion.

An application area learning device, includes a learning unit configured to perform machine learning on a correlation between a feature value at least inside a contour to be extracted from an outline image of a shoe component and an application area of an adhesive in the shoe component and generate a prediction model, and a learned model storage unit configured to store the prediction model.

A system to produce a textile component of an article includes an additive manufacturing device in selective communication with a processor and memory. The processor and memory are configured to determine a strain value in a region of a textile component of a reference article based on images of the reference article from a camera in selective communication with the processor and memory and to generate a strain map based on the strain value. The additive manufacturing device is configured to apply a reinforcement to a textile substrate of a custom article to variably reinforce the textile substrate according to the strain map and to form the textile component of the custom article.