Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CORTI (CO-OPERATIVE ROBOT APPLICATION IN THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY FOR FANCY YARN MACHINE)

Teaser

Textile industry is one of the largest industries in the world. To sustain its commercial success it becomes imperative to produce goods of high quality at reasonable prices to achieve customer satisfaction, which asks for continuous modernization of the textile machines.Each...

Summary

Textile industry is one of the largest industries in the world. To sustain its commercial success it becomes imperative to produce goods of high quality at reasonable prices to achieve customer satisfaction, which asks for continuous modernization of the textile machines.
Each step towards innovation means streamlining activities with a versatile approach to minimize the manpower in the intensive and repetitive jobs. It is expected to have an incremental level of automatization in the textile industries implemented with human-robot collaborative models, where humans are doing “customization” tasks.
CORTI project idea was born with the aim to facilitate the introduction of collaborative robot in the spinning area of the textile industry with a special outlook, at this stage, to the fancy yarn machines designed, produced and selled by Gualchieri&Gualchieri.
In this scenario, the objectives of the project are to develop a business plan to support the design and commercialization of a collaborative robot for fancy yarn machine applicable in flexible manner on new or existing yarn machine.
Two main drivers will manage the technical design phase: flexibility and cost of the cooperative solution. By matching the desired requirements, CORTI innovation will allows, at latest stage and in accordance with the business plan, the introduction of the cooperative robots for other manufacturing phases such as the unloading of the reels.
Based on the reasons given in the course of this Business Plan and the illustrated economic and financial estimates, it is considered that the project at this time does not have the requisites to be implemented.
Development costs (especially of the electronic part) were found unsustainable for the company. Even taking into account the possibility of using forms of financing such as HORIZON 2020, the final price of the product would be too important barrier for the current market.
However, given the potential interest of the market and the margins of growth of the same, it is believed that the company must proceed with further studies both in terms of design and internal reorganization that lead to a sustainable cost of the system.

Work performed

A preliminary CORT design, including mechanical design of the robot, including the motorization and the anchorage systems and hardware and software implementation of the communication protocol and for the cooperative phase.
High level cost review of the system and relative preliminary performance analysis.
The commercial cost breakdown and profitability analysis with commercial cost with optimized number of series, cost definition and investiment and return of investment analysis.
Patent search and patentability analysis.
The market analysis has been developed including main potential customers, target market, market need, main competitors, barriers to entry.
Finally the commercialization timeline is provided.

Final results

N/A