Food

Citrus Juice Bottles

220 bright yellow citrus juice bottles resembling lemons enter a grouping chain every minute. An F2 robot then picks them and places them into the transport tool of the transmodule. The attached label obviously lends a certain degree of difficulty to this process.

 Once a transmodule is completely loaded, it moves towards the pack tray. The pack trays (extreme left in picture) are erected from flat lying blanks, glued and transferred to a vacuum conveyor. At the following station or sub-machine, three rows of five bottles each are picked up by a F2 robot from the transmodule and transferred into the tray. The partially-filled tray then moves to the third sub-machine. Now an interesting thing happens. A F3 robot waits to receive two groups of 12 bottles from the transfer robot which loaded the transmodule before so that it can then turn them upside-down and position, or better yet, insert them into three trays simultaneously.

In the fourth sub-machine, the loaded trays are picked up from the vacuum conveyor and placed onto the discharge belt. Two different bottle sizes can run on the machine.

Slices of bread

In Japan, slices of bread are lightly toasted or baked twice. There are differences in size and shape from one slice of bread to another. The task was to transfer 240 slices of bread per minute from the cooling tunnel, place two slices on top of each other in the chain of the Fuji flow-wrap machine and make sure that the upper slice is always the smaller of the two. Placing the slices of bread in this fashion is necessary in order to not mislead the consumer. 

There is nothing better than a Schubert TLM picker line for solving this task: A TLM picker line which synchronizes with the infeed chain of the flow-wrap bag machine with an average speed of 305 mm a second. The slices of bread enter the machine via a continuously running conveyor belt. The art of the picker line is to adapt it to the  product flow in such a way that all good products are picked up from the belt and, in spite of irregular production, to ensure that no packages are empty or partially filled. TLM picker lines have been developed for this purpose, with their patented counter-directional workflow and their control design. This design allows the robot arms to independently coordinate which one places what component where. A gripper, specially developed for Harada, picks up each slice of bread after it has run through the TLM image processing system. The difficulty here was that the slices of bread are extremely breakable. Anything that does not meet the quality specifications or is not an exact match is left lying on the belt.