Great interest for robot palletizing

Over 60 interested visitors came to learn more about robot palletizing and material handling when Moving held an open house activity in May.

"A robot is ideal to handle the ever shorter life cycles and variation in packaging solutions" stated the invited speaker Henrik Knobel from ABB Robotics. "With a robot we increase reliability, flexibility, and time-to-market, parallel with better hygiene and quality" said Henrik Knobel.

Tommy Jönsson from Moving agreed and presented an interesting project, recently installed at chocolate manufacturer Marabou in Upplands Väsby. The system, supplied by Moving in co-operation with ABB Robotics, includes an ABB IRB 640 and can handle four different product formats. It palletizes 72 chocolate-boxes per minute!

With the Marabou-case as an example, Tommy Jönsson emphasized some major advantages with robots compared to traditional palletizing:
- high capacity
- flexible – handles different sizes without alteration
- ability to load a container
- requires limited space

In addition to the verbal presentations, the visitors were shown some live robot action. Among other things a solution to the problem with RRP – Retail Ready Packaging was presented. This kind of packaging is often very material-efficient, and therefore difficult for a robot to grip. But with a new kind of grip-device that problem is solved.