Universal Robots: Packaging and Palletizing by Collaborative Robot Arms

Ensure that your deliveries are always correctly counted and packed to the strictest standards

Streamline your packaging and palletizing operation to be simpler, faster, and more efficient. Relieve workers from repetitive work and heavy lifting by automating your packaging and palletizing with lightweight collaborative robot arms. Automation helps you combat the rising costs of new product packaging and shortened product life cycles.

The intuitive, easy-to-program interface makes the UR robot arm perfect for small-volume productions as well as highly repetitive tasks. You can reprogram and redeploy the robot as needed across your operations. If your work flow changes, the packaging or palletizing robotic arm can be deployed quickly and easily in new constellations due to its small size and lightweight design.

UR robots can be used in most packaging and palletizing applications. Our space-saving robots can also be reprogrammed quickly and used with many different machines.
Relieve workers from ergonomically unfavorable, repetitive work.
With robot arms from Universal Robots you can free up your work force in order to do more important tasks.
Lower your operation costs. Universal Robots gives you all the advantages of robotic automation, with none of the traditional added costs associated with robot programming, set-up, and dedicated, shielded work cells. The average payback period of 195 days is the fastest in the robot industry.
During busy seasons, UR robots can operate 24/7, delivering non-stop productivity to your business. They can be deployed and re-programmed as needed across tasks and applications as often as required.
All collaborative robots from Universal Robots are certified IP-54. They will need protection when working in corrosive liquid environment.

Norwegian meat producer Nortura needed to optimize palletizing, but with limited floor space and a tight budget. A UR10 robot with a ceiling-mounted vision system provided a cost-effective and high-performance palletizing system in one-fifth of the space typically required. If no pallet is present, the floor space is available for other processes.

Challenge:
Typical palletizing robots require a large fixed cell with safety caging that takes up extensive floor space. Nortura wanted to be able to palletize continuously without stopping the production line, but needed the flexibility of using the space for other processes if there were no pallets in place.

With a limited budget, Nortura had the added challenge of finding a cost-effective 6-axis robot that had the required range and payload capacity to stack boxes of different sizes and weights at different heights on a pallet. The robot also needed to be flexible and easy to program to work with the vision system, and reliable enough to run with minimal supervision.

Solution:
Nortura wanted to optimize palletizing, but couldn’t use a traditional palletizing robot which requires a large permanent cell with safety caging. Norwegian robotics integrator Rocketfarm AS customized a vision system to complement the Universal Robots UR10 collaborative robot for an innovative, small-footprint approach. The IFM O2D222 vision camera is mounted in the ceiling above the robot, which is mounted below it on a narrow stand and is equipped with the Unigripper SMS 80-200 vacuum gripper. While in standby mode, the mounted robot’s footprint is only .5m². The robot’s working area is simply a painted space on the floor, which marks where operators place an empty pallet. “We used maybe 10 to 20 percent of the space that a traditional robot would have used,” Lars Bårdgard Åstveit, developer at Rocketfarm AS. “When there’s no pallet there, the space is free—it’s as if the palletizing system doesn’t exist.”

Once a free pallet is placed on the floor, the vision system automatically detects it as well as boxes moving on the conveyor belt and begins palletizing on its own. “No one has to tell the robot, ‘there’s a box here now, go palletize it,’ adds Åstveit. “The system just sees it and starts palletizing.” The 6-axis robot’s program can be easily customized to stack different-sized boxes in the pattern that the customer of the pallet requires, such as turning boxes so that the box labels are visible on all sides of the pallet. The robot can stack an average of 20 pallets each day, for a total of 1700 boxes per day.

“The UR10 is a robot that has all the right specifications, It’s inexpensive, it has the range that not many other cobots have, and it has the payload so it can lift the products we need it to lift. And it’s quite flexible in its programming.”

Lars Bårdgard Åstveitdeveloper at Rocketfarm AS

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