Food and Beverage Packaging March 2012 : Page 21ROBOTS DEMONSTRATE THEIR METTLE EXAMPLES OF RECENT ROBOTIC INSTALLATIONS AS WELL AS NEW CAPABILITIES. • A recent installation of three integrated packaging lines was supplied by Bradman Lake Inc. to a well-known, multinational producer of nutritional bars. It illustrated the importance of integrating new robotic techniques to produce a completely automatic, integrated primary, secondary, and end-of-line machinery. In this installation, Bradman Lake used robotics to automatically transfer wrapped products from the primary wrap stage through secondary packaging and into fi nal end-of-line case packing ready for palletizing, creating labor cost reduction, increased line effi ciencies and output capacity. • Premier Tech launched a modular robotic innovation in the fi eld of bag packaging and it has a name: ANDY. It consists of a robot that transfers bags between the fi lling spout and the closing device of an open-mouth bagger (shown), which completes the automation of a semi-automatic bagger for gusseted and pillow-type formats at rates to 20 bags per minute. The robotic arrangement is said to achieve higher production rates and reduce the risk of accidents. • ABB Robotics’ Indexed Conveyor Tracking allows the ABB IRB 360 delta robot to accurately perform picking or placing operations on indexing conveyors at rates up to 450 indexes per minute. Designed to reduce the cost and complexity of high-speed carton loading, this application package allows the IRB 360 to perform many other pick-and place operations on indexing packaging machine infeeds, improving system throughput up to 50%. • Applied Robotics’ Clay Cooper recently viewed what he considered an exemplary installation of packaging a wrapped product. To achieve an acceptable ROI, an end-of-line twin robot case packing system supplied by ‹‹ Safe and sound: Under conditions hazardous for human operators, a modular robot alternates placement of bags to twin fi lling spouts for a powdered food ingredient. Motoman was developed. To achieve the required output, Motoman decided that two heads were better than one so they employed two robots working in concert. “It is impressive, even when you know the technological reasons why it works,” discloses Cooper. “To watch twin robots working together to case pack a product without supervision is impressive. Their parents would be proud.” and can simultaneously handle multiple infeeds of dif-ferent product, including bags, cases, pails and bottles. He also points out that robotic systems are usually less complex mechanically than conventional equipment, thus require less maintenance and are less likely to have failures. “Robotic equipment can usually work several thousands of hours before failure,” he adds. Dean Elkins, senior general manager, Motoman (www.motoman.com), cites the following advances as expanding the use of robots in packaging: • Speed and payload improvements in picking robots; • Payload increases in palletizing robots; • Capacity increases in conveyor tracking; • Greater simplicity in vision applications. “Higher payloads allows robots to be used in layer-forming applications in palletizing that were more readily accomplished with traditional palletizers in the past,” he adds. “Delta-style robots are demonstrat-ing increased speed and payload allowing for the faster picking and packaging of products in primary and sec-ondary packaging applications. Vision-based conveyor tracking and scheduling software makes programming tasks far more effi cient than in the past. “The food and beverage packaging market continues to embrace ‘unifi ed control’ strategies that allow robots to be programmed [similarly] as programmable logic controllers,” Elkins continues. “This can [permit] a lower cost of integration of a robot system and a lesser investment in retraining of employees leading to a low-er cost of ownership for the automation investment.” David Peters, CEO, Universal Robotics, Inc. (www. universalrobotics.com), who also sees software improve-ments as crucial for this market, views the impending release of Control System Software as signifi cant. “This MARCH WWW . FOOD ANDBEVERA GEP A CKA GING . COM 2012 FOOD & BEVERA GE P A CKA GING 21 Publication List Using a screen reader? Click Here |
