Not only from a consistency and speed
perspective – robot loading is twice as fast
as manual loading – but for our production
team, it takes away all the health and safety
issues linked to manual handling out of the
equation.”
However, there was another underlying
factor which helped tip the balance in
favour of a robot loading system, rather
than a like-for-like palletiser.
“One of the main reasons we chose the
robot system – aside from floorspace – was
that we wanted to move away from wooden
pallets, which we’d been using for years,
and start using plastic locator boards,” says
Fergus.
Locator boards are durable plastic interlayer
boards which allow barrels to be stacked
securely and safely on top one another.
At Adnams’ cask palletising system, the
FANUC R-200iC/210L will pick six filled casks
off the line and place them on a conveyor in
two rows of three. The robot will then select
a locator board from a magazine stored
within the cell, and place it on top of the six
barrels, before collecting the next six barrels
from the filling line and stacking them on
top. This process is repeated until there are
18 barrels securely stacked, before they are
moved to the end of the conveyor where
they can be collected by forklift truck and
either loaded directly onto a distribution
lorry, or stored nearby until ready for
collection.
Fergus concludes: “Plastic locator boards are
light, they’re cheaper, they last longer; and
they also enable you to get more product
on a vehicle as you can take some of the
weight out. Ultimately there were lots of
benefits from moving to locator boards
from pallets, however we couldn’t do that
on our old palletiser system so, as part of
putting the robot in, we moved to locator
boards as well.”
For more information on FANUC’s
range of palletising robots, please
visit: www.fanuc.eu/uk/en/robots.
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PECM Issue 39