Customer Requirement
Our plastic injection-molded parts manufacturer needed an automated solution to receive packed cases of product, weigh and scan them, and palletize them according to the product source production line.
There are six pallet build locations and one pallet stack and regrip station inside the working envelope of the gantry robot. Additionally, six production lines produce food-grade products in a cleanroom where MESH also supplied AMRs to move parts between manufacturing processes. The finished products are loaded into shipping cases, labeled, weighed, and passed through metal detectors before arriving at the gantry palletizer.
The cases are tracked through the system so that the gantry knows where to place each case in the palletizing area. Finished pallets are powered out of the work area of the gantry on MESH chain conveyor for forklift retrieval.
The MESH Solution
MESH selected GUDEL as the supplier of the mechanical package for the gantry. It is a single bridge, light payload gantry that spans one incoming case conveyor, six pallet building locations, one pallet storage location, and sections of exit conveyor to move finished pallets out of the pallet build area for manual pick-up by forklift.
MESH designed the system, built the end-of-arm tool, the pallet conveyors, and the case conveyor, integrated the labeling function, and supplied the cell motion controls and HMI package based on Rockwell PLC and Kinetix servo drives and motors. The pallet conveyor consists of one frame with six sets of stranded chains for pallet movement. The gantry and tool also move the pallet magazine, pick a pallet, and take it to a MESH squaring station to square the pallet before placing it on the next available pallet build location.
Automation Equipment
- Gudel mechanical package
- Gantry robot
- Cell motion controls and HMI package based on Rockwell PLC and Kinetix servo drives
- Customized end-of-arm tool
