Considering a Robotic Solution for Palletizing

The demand for improved line efficiencies and reduced costs has manufacturers increasingly looking to Robotic Automation material handling for a solution. Where speeds are low, depalletizing and palletizing operations can be served by manual labor. As speeds increase or the product becomes difficult to handle, automating these operations becomes a necessity. Over the last five years, robotics has entered the picture as an alternative to conventional depalletizers and palletizers in many situations, blurring the decision-making process as to what solution is best for a particular application.

If robotics appears to be the answer, an additional facet of the decision-making process will ultimately be what types of robots and components will go into the solution. Most current Robotic Palletizing or depalletizers use either gantry robots (pictured at left), known as “square” robots, or jointed-arm robots(pictured below), known as “round” robots, both nicknamed for their types of motion. Gantry robots are linear-motion robots, meaning they move up, down, and across in a work envelope that can be more than 80 ft long.

They are typically built to the dimensions of a specific project and offer more overall flexibility, including the capacity to work with a large number of pick-and-place locations. Jointed-arm robots are more limited in the size of their work envelope but are typically more economical and faster. In a typical palletizing application, a jointed-arm robot can build four pallet loads within its work cell.

Simplify Mold Design with Robotic Automation

Manufacturers have many factors to consider when designing equipment to manufacture products in the plastics industry. Six-axis jointed robots can offer significant cost savings during mold design and manufacture, as well as during production.

Using a Robotic Automation to machine cavities in the part enables moldmakers to simplify mold design with fewer moving parts, like retractable cores. Removing core features from the molded part also eliminates obstacles to material flow, which further simplifies design. Machining core features instead of molding enables easy product changes, requiring no costly mold retrofits.

In addition, robots have the capability to do insert molding applications. Robotic Automation can place inserts very accurately into the mold. Compared to a manual operation, it is much more efficient since the machine can be run in full-automatic mode. When placing the inserts manually Robotic Automation, the operator needs to stop the machine, disable guarding, place inserts and re-enable the safeties, losing valuable production time.

Palletizing applications pile up for robots

Palletizing applications pile up for robots: robots, faster and cheaper than ever, can be competitive in many more palletizing.When it comes to the end of the line, robots may be the end of the line.Traditionally, robotic palletizing has been viewed as an intermediate step between strictly manual and fully automatic. For a robot to make sense at the end of the line, the application had to be low-volume and/or highly variable, with shifting pallet patterns that required great flexibility.

That’s still true, of course. But reliability and other factors have improved in robotic palletizing systems to the point where, in some applications, they can compete directly as a alternative to fully automatic ram-based systems.End users who are moving away from manual palletizing often have to choose between robotic and traditional palletizers. That’s the choice faced by English Mountain Spring Water, Dandridge, Tenn.

English Mountain considered a conventional palletizer, but settled on a KR 180 robot system from Kuka Robotics, installed by Aidco International. The robotic automation system was only about $10,000 more than the conventional one, and offered more versatility, says company president John Burleson.”We felt that down the road, we could actually take [the robot] and put it anyplace in the plant and maybe even retool it to do some additional work,” Burleson says.