Empty Bottle Palletizing

Our customer is a manufacturer of molded plastic bottles for the food industry. They added a shipping preparation area where bottles could be palletized, strapped, and wrapped for delivery to their customers. The bottle sizes range from 1-liter containers to 2-gallon containers and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Each bottle type needs a particular gripping method and has a specific pallet pattern. Additionally, the mouth of the bottle cannot be touched.

MESH’s solution included the FANUC M710iC 45M 6-axis robot and a multi-purpose end-of-arm tool. This allowed our customer to stay ahead of the required rate of throughput and handle the variety of bottles. Divider sheets and a plastic top support frame were used on certain pallet patterns. All pallet pattern and part requirements are accessible on the system control operator interface HMI allowing easy changeovers. The robot is mounted to a steel baseplate and riser assembly with the infeed conveyor and pallet build locations nearby. The bottles are metered into the cell via customer-supplied conveyor and the robot picks one or more bottles per trip to palletize them on the pallet build stations. The robot places slip sheets between each layer of bottles on the pallet. MESH supplied their slip sheet magazine so that many slip sheets could be stored near the robot, allowing for long runs.

A low-level sensor is used to tell the operators when it is time to replenish the magazine with divider sheets. The customer designed and built a tray delivery system allowing our robot to pick from and place the folded and glued tray into the appropriate location in the robotic cell. Some pallet patterns require the tray for the topper and others the plastic frame for the topper.

Once a pallet is complete, the conveyor system sends the finished pallet out of the cell to the customer’s wrapper.