Gaiotto selected in Emilia-Romagna investment attractiveness tender
Proposed under the European Regional Development Program POR FESR 2014-2020, the tender funds strategic employment-boosting investment plans. These mainly concern industrial research and experimentation programs that target the development and dissemination of significant technological advances for production systems; such investments also seek to acquire new capacities of technological and industrial relevance to regional manufacturing chains.
Industrial robotics is increasingly important to modern manufacturing. However, its application on a wider scale poses several problems: for example, robots, once programmed, have a certain rigidity and workers now need to have a high-end skills set.
Gaiotto's ‘Development of Advanced Programming Techniques for Industrial Robots’ project seeks to address these issues. Step 1 is the development of new off-line programming software. In practice, this allows users to program robot tasks without any machine downtimes. Step 2 is the ‘virtualization’ (digital twinning) of robotic systems to allow kinematic and dynamic simulation. Lastly, Step 3 is the implementation of new algorithms that aid self-learning, allowing humans to simply and efficiently teach the robot to perform the necessary movements.
Several solutions in Gaiotto's portfolio already make full use of these principles. Such solutions form the core of the SACMI range and have multiple applications across various businesses (glazing, pressure casting, handling, etc.). This project aims to push forward the frontiers of future applications by using increasingly sophisticated hardware and software: to do so it will draw on 900,000 euros of co-funding provided under the regional tender and recruit some 25 new technicians onto the Gaiotto team.