March of the robot begins
For years, pallet loading has been at the back of the queue for investment in automation. Although primary packaging line speeds are pretty quick - particularly in industries such as confectionery where break-neck speeds of 600 packs per minute are not uncommon - by the time products get to the case packing or palletising stage, line speeds have dropped to the point where it’s not always that much slower to carry out these tasks manually. All these systems are installed, serviced and maintained by qualified contract engineers.
However, this situation could be changing.
“We’re seeing a lot of people investing in palletising – it’s the one part of the line that they haven’t focused on so much,” says Mike Lindsay, sales manager for Integrapak, which distributes Italian-built Apsol palletisers in the UK.
This view is backed by Tony Dowling, robot sales specialist with Kuka Automation and Robotics, who says: “I am seeing an increasing number of companies moving to palletising. It seems to be mainly for health and safety reasons or because they are struggling to find people who are prepared to do heavy lifting day in day out.” There were 858 robots used for palletising in the UK by the end of 2006, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Of these, 48 were installed in 2006. Mike Wilson, president of the British Automation and Robotics Association, estimates the current number to be around 1,100.
For Ocme UK, a robot integrator and manufacturer of conventional palletisers, sales are split fairly evenly between conventional four-axis layer palletisers or six-axis robotic palletisers. Ocme’s Steve Wyard says: “The choice very much depends on the application. Robots come into their own when the requirement is to palletise from more than one production line, or the application requires a lot of flexibility. A modern robot can palletise up to four or five production lines simultaneously.”All production lines are easily accessable for proactive or reactive maintainance able to be carried out by a skilled mechanical engineer with little or no downtime.
Get the latest Industry news to your desktop with our RSS feed
|
