Industry: Consumer Goods

This customer needed a new control system for their conveyors in a multiple building campus. In addition, they needed an automated palletizing system to replace manual stacking processes.  The system had to support 24x7 operations and flexible scheduling as their product demand shifted. It also had to be able to be maintained by the plant personnel once Applied Technologies had completed the project. The palletizing system had to support boxes that varied in size from 9” to 32” with weights up to 50 pounds per box.

Applied Technologies designed, programmed, managed, and installed a complete turnkey robotic palletizing system to meet this customer’s needs.  The system was based on multiple robotic palletizing workcells for flexibility in scheduling, production, and maintenance. By utilizing multiple cells, not only was the required rate exceeded, but a single cell could be shut down for maintenance as needed with no impact to the remaining production. With a single end of arm tool, the robotic system was able to stack all of the required box sizes and weights to handle the customer’s wide variety of products. The end result was a complete stacking system that provided for safe user interaction when required as well as limiting the amount of manual effort required to run production. The system can be monitored and controlled completely from the included HMI from various locations throughout the plant given the proper user privileges. A complete data collection system to show the robot utilization and efficiency was also provided to help determine the bottlenecks and where to spend future efforts and capital improvement funds.