Automated and Flexible Coil Winding Robotic Framework

European electrical machines manufacturers need to increase the flexibility of production process, due to the high cost of equipment setup at the beginning of each new production batch. Overall, most of these European manufacturers are striving to reduce costs while preserving the quality of products, in order to face the competition by Far East companies. There is a strong need for increasing productivity, flexibility and quality. In particular, in wound coils manufacturing process, current technologies allow only to big international manufacturer to automate their production lines, due to high machinery cost and set-up time, while small and medium manufacturers are forced to direct themselves towards manual production. This work aims to reduce costs and increase flexibility with the following contributions: (1) important reduction of setup time and costs of the winding machine, thanks to the simplicity and flexibility of the proposed approach; (2) increase in the quality of the final motors, thanks to the increased amount of copper that the robot will be able to insert in each coil with respect to manual winding; (3) possibility to parallelize the winding operations, dramatically increasing production rate; (4) decreased number of defected cores, thanks to an advanced quality inspection system; (5) reduction of environmental impact of the production process, thanks to a reduction of wasted copper wire.