Flexible robots provide room for manoeuvre at Frank Roberts and Sons

Citation

(2006), "Flexible robots provide room for manoeuvre at Frank Roberts and Sons", Industrial Robot, Vol. 33 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2006.04933daf.005

Flexible robots provide room for manoeuvre at Frank Roberts and Sons

Flexible robots provide room for manoeuvre at Frank Roberts and Sons

Keywords: Robotics, Food industry

Independent bakers Frank Roberts and Sons are investing over £800,000 as part of their ongoing development project in an automated bread tin store from RTS Flexible Systems using a pioneering new solution. The RTS system will deploy six-axis robots for the first time ever in a UK bread tin store. The solution promises exceptional material and labour cost savings, with a healthy ROI (Plate 5).

Plate 5 The automation of bread tin store will give Frank Roberts and Sons exceptional material and labour cost savings, with a healthy ROI

To win the order, RTS had to solve the problem of how to automate the loading and unloading of bread tins on two separate bread plants, one producing circa 13,000/h at the bakery in Northwich, Cheshire. The extremely confined 8ft headroom made it unsuitable for RTS' more conventional “RTS Crocus” gantry robot solution. There are 30 Crocus gantries currently in service at bakeries in the UK.

Roberts Chief Engineer Chris Daniels said: “RTS have worked with us to develop a unique solution to exchanging bread tin types. It means we can dispense with a heavy, hot and noisy manual lifting job, bringing health and safety benefits and enabling us to redeploy staff more effectively elsewhere in the bakery.

“The consistently gentle action of the robots' magnetic grippers also means we can achieve dramatic savings by reducing damage to the bread tins. With automation we expect to extend the life of a set of bread tins to five years – double what is possible when the tins are loaded and unloaded manually.”

Each of the two systems integrates two ABB IRB 6600 six-axis robots with a conventional floor conveyor, and incorporates RTS software. The first robot unloads four-tin bread straps from the continuous production line. The second reloads the required tin types back onto the line. Whereas in conventional automated stores, the bread tins are stored on the floor, in this system the straps are stacked on the floor conveyor, which moves in both directions to bring the stacked tin straps to the robots.

The robots will be fitted with a version of the RTS' proven magnetic grippers to pick up the bread tins. Magnetic grippers have the advantage of being much more compliant to tin damage and distortion, than a “finger-type” gripper. They also incorporate part present sensors to detect when tins are missing.