"StackTeck is a local Canadian, Brampton-Ontario, provider of plastic tooling solutions for the injection molding industry, delivering higher productivity to the Caps, Closures, PET Preforms, Thin Wall Packaging, Technical and Medical worldwide market. There is a need to automate the bending of manifold heating elements that are assembled into their Hot Runner manifolds. This challenge arises due to the lack of this process being available in the market. As of now, the company has an entirely manual process which is dependent on one or a few stakeholders, which proves to be a significant risk for the company. This initiative is intended to benefit StackTeck by achieving higher quality products, time savings, increase in productivity, decrease in production waste and mitigating risks. To achieve these benefits, the project has the following goals, steps, and research challenges to be achieved: o Stage one: research the heating elements bending options, analyse, testing and product development strategy, o Stage Two: Handling and feeding product for automation process, concept generations and optimisation, o Stage Three: Heating elements 2D bending prototype design, build and test, with manual controller, concept testing and refining, o Stage Four: concept combinations and ranking study to redesign, rebuild and test the final prototype, with advanced control, and programmed logic HMI interface. o Stage Five: (to be included as a separate project): design and build a functional prototype, 3D bending capability, with an interface to obtain data from an advanced interface, prepared program or from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) mode. - This project will serve as a pilot to an ARD application for 2024 where the main goal will be to improve the automation solution initial design, test the product, and incorporate it into the everyday process of the company."