A probabilistic approach to reconfigurable interactive manufacturing and coil winding for Industry 4.0

The robotic industry needs new, innovative, ideas to be globally competitive. Conventional industrial robots are not able to adapt to changes in the assembly processes. Flexible assembly applications are actually uncommon and only isolated attempts exploit industrial robots to perform tasks with variability in the parts. Variability aspects are emphasized when developing novel manufacturing applications involving human–robot collaboration which are the foundation of Industry 4.0 systems. In this chapter, we describe how variability can be considered and mathematically described as part of the problem to obtain a flexible robotic solution. The selected approach is based on a probabilistic representation of the task obtained starting from a set of demonstrations collected from humans.