Palletizing with Cobots

Our customer makes condiments and needed a system to pick and palletize cases of product. Their products include salt, pepper, catsup packets, croutons and flavoring packets. All products are created and packed as individual items. These are then placed into cases. There are a variety of case sizes and pallet patterns.

MESH supplied our MACcoPal standard solution. The cases are generally light and the rates are within the capability of the cobot. MESH established a set of knowns with the customer so that the robotic palletizer system could be configured and sized to suit the needs of the lines. A tablet interface allowed for the quick changeover and adjustment of the cobot activities.

The MESH solution was based on the FANUC CRX 25 cobot and a simple, cobot friendly gripper tool along with conveyor, sensing, logic and safety devices that allowed us to run at both cobot and above cobot speeds. The area was congested with both personnel and forklift traffic. The flow from the fillers through the labelers to the MESH cobot palletizers could be both smooth and at times sporadic depending on other process equipment requirements.

Two FANUC CRX-25iA cobots each with:

• Baseplate and riser along with its controller
• Cobot controller with cable and hard outer case
• One vacuum end-of-arm tool
• One 2-section infeed and case prep conveyor
• Two floor details for locating the pallets

The CRX-25iA cobot with the applied cobot end-of-arm tooling averaged 5 trips per minute while in full cobot mode and 7 trips per minute when using the added safety equipment. This safety equipment included scanners and small sections of safety fencing. The number of trips per minute varied depending on pick location and place location on the pallet.

The customer was very impressed with the overall uptime and consistent throughput of the MESH MACcoPal systems.