Citation
(2011), "Her Majesty the Queen opens new robot palletising line at Heinz", Industrial Robot, Vol. 38 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2011.04938cab.002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Her Majesty the Queen opens new robot palletising line at Heinz
Article Type: News From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 38, Issue 3
The Queen recently opened a new robot palletising line for leading UK food manufacturer H.J. Heinz as part of a visit to commemorate 50 years since the Kitt Green factory near Wigan was opened.
This turnkey project was awarded to BHL Conveyor Technology of Wigan who selected Motoman Robotics UK to provide the robotic palletising element of the project.
The system was designed and built to automatically convey, collate and palletise canned multipack product onto merchandisable units (MUs), these MUs were then transported on conveyors via an ITW Mima Stretchwrapper to the unloading point. Motoman’s ES165 handling robots are at the core of the new process.
The automated robotic palletising system needed the ability to not only match the high speed and volume of the production process but maintain the stringent quality demands of the palletised product for transport and handling needs. Added to this, it was vitally important to the customer that the automation be easy to operate with a friendly user interface.
BHL developed the pack transportation and collation system for the product to accumulate and sort from the infeed conveyor systems while Motoman’s ES robots with heads developed and built by Automated Engineering handle the actual palletising of the product.
Motoman engineers developed a high-speed cooperating two robot system. The first robot picks and places empty pallets and new layer sheets while the second robot with a specialist gripper picks and places two complete pallet layers of collated product.
The Motoman ES165 robots can be tasked to handle different pallet configurations, enabling the building of different pallet height formats through the systems intuitive HMI interface.
Mike Blake, Director at BHL stated “The project has been a highly successful partnership between H.J. Heinz, BHL and Motoman with the companies working hand in hand to successfully develop a robust automated solution while meeting a very detailed program of installation and commissioning timescales. The whole process from initial concept design to installation and commissioning has been a great success.”
The Motoman ES range was chosen over competitors products for this project because it has been designed and engineered to make it exemplary for handling and palletising applications while maintaining a very easy to use programming interface.
Part of a wider range of robots offered by Motoman, the world’s largest robot manufacturer, palletising robots incorporate a payload over 900 kg with a reach of over 3,100 mm.