SALTO PRESENTS AN INNOVATIVE ROBOTISED RECONFIGURABLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM EMPLOYING LASER TECHNOLOGY FOR TEXTILE CUTTING – IN852A 2016/29

• This laser cutting system enables the automation of highly deformable decorated fabric cutting for short production runs.
• Part of the 2016 PEME Connect Programme, the project consortium is led by SELMARK and is completed by the companies SYSPRO, UNIMATE and ENXENIA. AIMEN participates as a collaborating entity.
• This new solution, at the pre-mass production stage, allows the cutting process cycle time to be reduced, adapting to a variety of fabrics and designs, ensuring a low failure rate.

The SALTO project has developed a flexible and adaptive laser cutting system for the textile sector with a new concept of reconfigurable robotic manufacturing. Specifically, it proposes the development of a new comprehensive manufacturing system that enables the automation of the cutting of highly deformable decorated fabric for short production runs and with a large number of catalogue items, designs and product models.

In this way, it is intended to make a qualitative and quantitative leap in the productive capacities for textile cutting operations. The technologies developed will have a positive impact on the efficiency in manufacturing and lead time, as well as on the manufacturing capacity of increasingly individualized products and the improvement of operators’ working conditions.

This new solution, at the pre-mass production stage, will reduce the cycle time of the cutting process and the manufacturing time of a new product from the current three days, to an estimated half-day. In addition, SALTO will allow savings in fabric and an improvement in the rate of failures or rejections that can be detected during the quality control process.

With this new solution, an innovative manufacturing system is presented that involves industrial modernization which is of particular interest for fabric-cutting processes in textile manufacturing companies.

Main Milestones Achieved

The following project activities were completed in the 2018 twelve-month period: adaptive and online process control software, cell manufacturing management software and manufacturing system validation. This includes the integration of artificial vision in the control application, the adaptive control of the automatic generation of industrial robot trajectories, as well as the integration in the control of the multi-process cell, both in terms of automation and the manufacturing process of laser cutting for the variety of products used and of interest in the lingerie sector.

To achieve these technical advances, throughout 2018, the integration of subsystems in two robotized cells with similar configuration was carried out, located in AIMEN and Selmark, and this made it possible to evaluate and validate these developments in laboratory and pre-mass production environments.

Inter-sectoral collaboration

The SALTO project, with a budget of 357,435 euros and a total duration of 34 months, is part of the 2016 ConectaPEME Programme.

For the development of this project, a multidisciplinary consortium was set up led by SELMARK (design and manufacture of lingerie garments) and completed by the companies SYSPRO (services aimed at the integration of technologies in the fields of automation, industrial software, robotics and artificial vision), UNIMATE (engineering specializing in the automation of processes with industrial robots) and ENXENIA (engineering and R&D specializing in mechanical design and assistance in the production process to manufacturing and product transformation companies).

This corporate grouping works in collaboration with the AIMEN Technological Centre.