Heavyweight robot for palletizing

In recent years, the sales of drinking fountains have increased significantly. In offices and shops, large-capacity drinking water dispensers allow people to quickly quench their thirst. Therefore, PET bottled water with a capacity of between 3 liters and 20 liters is becoming more and more popular. The capacity is large and the weight is large. 20 litres of water is 20 kilograms of weight. This is particularly evident in the case of manual palletizing. From the perspective of ergonomics, it is not a long-term solution.

High efficiency of processing 4000 PET bottles per hour

Entrusted by a major international soft drink manufacturer, Krones AG, Neutraubling, Germany, developed a robotic device designed to operate particularly heavy-duty bottled water pallets and depallets. This six-axis robot has a load capacity of 350 kg and can reach 500 working pulses per hour, so it can be installed as a separate device on a production line that fills 2,000 containers per hour. It is responsible for the delivery and output of water bottles.

The 20-litre empty bottle first entered a metal frame with a total of five metal shelves. Each row was lined with two empty bottles and four lines. The empty bottles are fixed on the production line and two metal racks are parked side by side on the sampan plate conveyor belt for simultaneous processing and use. The robot's specially designed vacuum pipette gripper grabs one empty bottle, namely eight empty bottles, from two metal racks, and places them on the conveyor belt and sends it to the filling equipment. During the delivery process, an ejection device pushes the second empty bottle forward through the metal frame, and the robot then picks up the empty bottle. In this way, one of the five metal shelves is completely vacant. At the end of the conveyor belt, filled empty bottles are waiting for the next loading. At this point, the robot loads the first row of eight full 20 litres of bottled water onto the sampan. Next, each robot puts an empty bottle and loads a row of filled bottled water. The operation step continues until the remaining empty bottles on the metal rack are processed. The robot's working efficiency is 500 working pulses per hour, eight empty bottles at a time, that is, a total of 4000 bottles of PET bottled water per hour.