RTS achieves the ultimate challenge for robotic pick and place

Citation

(2007), "RTS achieves the ultimate challenge for robotic pick and place", Industrial Robot, Vol. 34 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2007.04934faf.003

RTS achieves the ultimate challenge for robotic pick and place

RTS achieves the ultimate challenge for robotic pick and place

Could a robot pick up a poppadum without breaking it? What is more could it pick up four in succession and put them down together? Could it do this at 100 picks per minute, 24h per day, seven days per week with a very low- breakage rate?

It might seem impossible, but RTS Flexible Systems have proved it can be done – and that the installed system can deliver a healthy return on investment in less than two years, by significantly reducing labour costs over three shifts and increasing production capacity.

RTS, the innovative UK provider of vision-guided robotic pick and place systems to the food industry, developed the system in response to a challenge to replace a heavily labour-intensive process. Individual poppadums were manually picked, having been delivered from a frying machine by conveyor, then stacked into piles of four. The piles then needed to be manually picked again and placed into a vacuum forming machine.

Using a combination of RTS Pixcelle vision systems and ABB Flexpicker robots, the RTS system (Figure 2) is able to collect four poppadums one by one from the conveyor and place them for packaging in the vacuum forming machine. It is also capable of handling multiple product variants for variety packs.

Figure 2 The new system from RTS can pick and place poppadums without breaking them

The key to the solution is the end- effector technology, which enables the poppadums to be handled extremely gently. Also key was the ability of RTS' own vision software to determine which poppadums can be picked successfully from the conveyor by instructing the robot to avoid any that are on top of, or overlapped with another.

Said David Bradford, Managing Director of RTS Flexible Systems:

“If we can develop a workable and commercially viable solution for such a challenging product, then there must be very few products for which automation could not potentially deliver significant production benefits.”

“The RTS team developed the application using an iterative approach to come up with a reliable solution that not only worked in RTS' workshops but also on site in a real production situation. We are confident the approach could be adopted for any similar products where the need for extremely gentle manual handling leads to high labour costs.”

For further information, please contact: Sue Jones, RTS Flexible Systems, e-mail: sue.jones@rts-group.com