Just about any object can be picked up and placed with these machines, and they can do other delicate food tasks, including scoring lines on bread before it is baked. This kind of super-adaptable packaging set-up isn't limited to a particular kind of product. The pancake stackers, too, can stack pancakes in short or tall stacks, in as many columns as needed, without just a little reprogramming. So you can use the same assembly line for salamis of one length in the morning and an inch longer in the afternoon, and all you have to swap out is the packaging, not the robots.
ABB SPIDER ROBOT VIDEO INSTALL
But the benefit of having robots this fast and flexible is that you don't have to install machinery that will, say, make sure all of the salamis are lying straight and equidistant from each other. You can package food without such agile machines. “I know this was a real challenge,” he says.
The claws – each robot has three – have more moving parts than a vacuum, and timing their opening and closing is trickier than just turning a vacuum on and off. Four of them are working right in each others' elbow room, thanks to space constraints in the factory, and they are grabbing the salami in small mechanical claws and depositing them on plastic sheeting that will be sealed up around them. The salami video shows a tougher situation for the robots, says Bengtsson. “You have this expression once in a million, but when you are picking pancakes in a line like this, if you had a failure or a problem once in a million, that would be quite often.” “There's a lot of deep-down technology to get this accurate,” Bengtsson says. Overall the robotic team can stack more than 400 pancakes per minute. The Honeytop set-up has four robots spread out along the conveyor belt, so if one robot doesn't have time to grab all the pancakes in its view, another robot will. Here are the robots at work at a Honeytop Specialty Foods factory, with a soundtrack that sounds a bit “Mission: Impossible”: To find out more about how they work, I spoke to Klas Bengtsson, a product manager at ABB, a Swiss company which makes food-grabbing delta robots. It's not a side of processed foods you see that much, but it is everywhere.
Now intelligent robotic arms perform dazzling movements and expert feats of coordination, getting everything from frozen fish chunks to cookies swiftly into their packaging. They are incredibly quick and can do jobs in food packaging that only humans used to be able to do, like sorting or stacking randomly arranged objects, without the repetitive stress injuries such tasks give people.Īutomation in the food industry has moved far beyond the simple labelling machines and conveyor belts you may be familiar with. It turns out these robots are based on a design by Swiss robotics professor Reymond Clavel of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, called a delta robot. The packets were piled willy-nilly, but the machine and its colleagues – two others were also manning the line – seemed to know where each one was and worked together to collect them all in seconds. Over a conveyor belt, a large robot spider danced over packets of sweets, plucking each one up with human speed and precision and placing it in a carton. Last July, while touring a jelly bean factory, I came upon a startling sight.
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