Consistency increase of your stacking and unstacking processes can be greatly influenced by automating your business or shop with a palletizing robot.
Palletizing can be defined as a demanding application that usually involves loading of cases, bags, cartons, boxes or bottles onto pallets. This is usually the last step in the manufacturing process just before products are loaded onto shipping trucks.
The opposite of palletizing is de-palletizing where loaded packages are unloaded in a reverse pattern.
Where as many manufacturing and distribution centres are still doing it manually, it poses a lot of risks such as injuries to the human workers. However, automated palletizing through the use of industrial robots which are automatically programmed are doing a commendable job in the packaging and palletizing process.
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Benefits of Investing into Robotic Palletizing
- By using palletizing robot, human employees are no longer required to bend, twist or lift heavy substances. Therefore, injuries and being absent from work as a result of injury related issues is completely eliminated.
- Since these robots are automatically programmed to perform the tasks, unscheduled stoppages are greatly minimized leading to increased output from the line as well as improved use of the equipment.
- Palletizing robots greatly increase the productivity level with lots of indirect savings.
There are several types of robotic solutions that can help streamline your packaging and palletizing operation by making it faster, simpler and efficient.
Layer Palletizing and De-palletizing
A distribution centre usually has a variety of different products with different packaging types. Having these products stacked up in different layers can make the process of de-palletizing and order picking to be rather difficult.
However, palletizing robots with a universal gripping system have been designed. Considering the fact that most types of packages have flat bottoms, the robots are able to handle and pick up layers of products that other conventional technologies would not be able to.
In this type of robot solution, products are lifted from opposite directions by two rubber rollers which are servo driven. The gripping control software then automatically adjusts the height position and contact pressure of the rubber rollers.
This is done so as to perfectly fit the dimensions and package weight of the lifted products to prevent damages.
Advantages
- Its integrated centre layer ensures that products are placed in accurate layers.
- Even in case of a power failure, the products cannot be dropped as the grip will still hold.
- Its adaptive gripping and gentle handling of the packages ensures that there are no damages.
- This type of robotic solution is capable of handling a wide range of products with different packaging types.
Freezer Layer Palletizing
The increased demand for deep frozen products has been witnessed over the past few decades. This is because, frozen products have longer storage life.
Until today, workers have been made to work under very harsh environmental conditions since these products have to be order picked from very cold distribution centres.
Palletizing robots are coming in handy to perform such tasks as they can cope with the harsh temperatures. The robot generally unloads the required amount of product layers from the pallet.
The products are then transferred to a third layer conveyor and the products are then ready for pickup according to a customer’s preference.
The gripper concept with the combination of clamping and vacuum technology has proved that a wide variety of deep-frozen products can actually be successfully handled by the use of standard packages.
Advantages
- High profits as a result of high palletizing performance.
- Reduced hard physical labor under harsh environmental conditions.
- System concept can be changed to adapt to any specific production need.
- Small workplace required.
Conclusion
There are other types of robotic solutions such as mixed case palletizing and inline palletizing.
Today, many factories and industries are applying palletizing robot solutions in their automation processes.
This has led to a rapid growth in productivity, high return on investment and also products run for longer periods of time as a result of their flexibility.