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.
Tags: Pick and Place Systems, Robotic Automation, Robotic Palletizing
