FLEXICOIL: Flexible Robotized Coils Winding for Electric Machines Manufacturing Industry

Wound coils can are installed in several products (motors, generators, sensors) in order to exploit the electromagnetic effect for a wide range of applications. Small lot sizes and high product flexibility cannot be achieved with conventional winding systems. In fact, highly productive automated winding systems are not flexible enough and manual labor causes high product costs. FLEXICOIL aims at overcoming these drawbacks by developing a collaborative robotic cell for coils winding. We plan three subsequent sets of activities in order to enable the development of a reconfigurable interactive manufacturing cell with learning capabilities. The cell is designed for learning how to wind the coils of several kind of motors already on the market, through a simple teaching interface that can be easily used by operators without specific skills in robotics. The solution proposed by FLEXICOIL is affordable from small-medium enterprises (SMEs) producing small batches of motors and frequently changing product designs, while it could be an additional value for big companies having a market request of several thousand standard units.