Food for thought: Robot stacks sandwiches in 800 milliseconds Although simple automation can
frequent shortage of labour. Their
give some manufacturers the boost
production lines were understaffed,
needed to increase production and
and they were always missing people
product consistency, more complex
from their optimum shift capacity,”
applications often require intelligent,
says Kyran Findlater, Mechatronics
flexible robotic solutions that can
Designer at TechBrew. Obviously
adapt to variable products and picking
TechBrew had to consider national
locations. In the case of a large-scale
food safety regulations when designing
sandwich producer, growing production
this solution, and in this case the
demands coupled with a major labour
integrator used the cleanroom version
shortage provided motivation for
of Kawasaki’s 5 kg payload RS005L
them to robotically automate a high-
general purpose robot. As standard it
speed sandwich stacking application.
offers a pressurized cavity, ISO Class
To resolve the challenge, TechBrew Robotics, a Kawasaki Robotics Preferred Integrator based in British Columbia, Canada, designed a custom solution using Kawasaki’s R series robots and F60 controller. The robots’ task may seem simple: after the sandwiches are halved in the cutting machine, the robots need to pick up and rotate to stack one half on top of the other, making them easier for human workers to package manually further down the line. However, this application was tricky to automate for a number of reasons. The sandwich halves vary in their position as they come out of the cutting machine, so the robot would need some sort of vision intelligence to recognise and understand the location of each half on the conveyor. They also needed to be able to stack the sandwiches in practically the blink of an
the sandwich cutting machine itself. To maximise throughput, the robots face outward, stacking sandwiches on two different conveyors which are running simultaneously. There are many variables in this application, so TechBrew used a laser range finding system coupled with conveyor tracking to detect the shape and location of the sandwich halves as they emerge from the cutting machine. Once the sandwich halves have been stacked, they travel down the conveyor to a place where human workers are waiting to place the product into triangular cardboard boxes. TechBrew designed a custom gripper specifically for this application. The pneumatic end effector is controlled directly by the F60 Controller, allowing for quick movements. A controllable pressure plate comes down to hold the
5 cleanroom specification, and comes with an aluminium arm cover, rubber outer seals and a chemical resistant epoxy paint finish for easy wash down. The patent-pending end effector’s tool-less design makes it easy to disassemble for cleaning purposes, and it is constructed with stainless steel and food-grade plastic. The combination of Kawasaki’s AS programming language and its F60 controller easily handled the complexities of this project. Findlater was able to program this application directly on the robot, without a coprocessor, which reduced costs and simplified the installation. The Kawasaki F60 Controller’s high processing speed handled real-time scanning and data analysis on the sandwich halves, and output the robot coordinates in under 200 milliseconds, while processing a
eye.
product in place as two stainless steel
Because TechBrew needed to integrate
lift it. Once lifted, the actuator spins the
its solution into the customer’s
sandwich half through 180°, and force
existing production line, it meant
The entire sandwich stacking process
dampers at the end of the rotation keep
making creative use of limited space.
takes just 800 milliseconds and
the sandwich and its ingredients intact.
according to TechBrew, it didn’t take
paddles slide under the sandwich half to
To this end, the R series robots were inversely mounted on a cantilever
Like many other manufacturers, the
beam attached to the cutting machine,
customer struggled, sometimes daily,
and the F60 controllers’ compact
to keep up with production goals
size made it possible to save further
due to absent workers. “The main
space by stacking them on top of
driver for the end user here was the
28 FDPP - www.fdpp.co.uk
queue of sandwiches at a rate of 60 per minute.
the customers’ line managers long to adjust to their new robotic co-workers. Throughput has increased significantly as a result of the robot’s consistency. https://robotics.kawasaki.com/en1/
