ABB FlexPicker Packaging Robot

ABB con­tin­ues to improve their pack­ag­ing robots with the sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion IRB 360 robot. Com­pared to the IRB 340, it has increased speeds, high­er pay­loads, and a small­er footprint. 

It is fit­ted with triple grip­pers that allow the robot to pick up three ran­dom­ly posi­tioned prod­ucts from the con­vey­or belt and places the prod­ucts indi­vid­u­al­ly on a roll stock machine. An upstream image pro­cess­ing sys­tem pro­vides the posi­tion­ing and loca­tion data. The 3kg pay­load demon­strates its high capac­i­ty to offer increased prod­uct flex­i­bil­i­ty, and the supe­ri­or track­ing per­for­mance enables the prod­ucts to be picked while moving.

The ABB IRB 360 Flex­Pick­er is equipped with inte­grat­ed vision soft­ware to rec­og­nize the prod­uct type and the ori­en­ta­tion on the con­vey­or belt. It has high-speed flex­i­bil­i­ty to ensure pro­duc­tion is max­i­mized. The Pick­Mas­ter soft­ware com­ple­ments the Flex­Pick­er and makes pro­gram­ming simple.

The Flex­Pick­er can be tai­lored to a wide range of appli­ca­tions due to the four dif­fer­ent vari­ants of the robot. The stan­dard mod­el can be altered to increase arm length if the robot needs to reach over large con­vey­ors. The com­pact mod­el saves floor space and can fit into com­pact pack­ag­ing machines. The high pay­load vari­ant can take more prod­ucts simultaneously. 

This robot also has a hygien­ic design for wash down appli­ca­tions to ensure food safe­ty. Before pack­aged food gets to con­sumers, it must be picked up from a con­vey­or belt and pack­aged. When robots pack­age food, they improve hygien­ic con­di­tions, as well as increase place­ment speed. 

The ABB Flex­Pick­er is specif­i­cal­ly designed for high speed pack­ag­ing, pick and place and assem­bly appli­ca­tions for food indus­tries, as well as phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and gen­er­al FMCG industries.

At Hon­ey­Top Foods Facil­i­ty, the ABB Flex­Pick­er was cho­sen because of the accel­er­at­ed pro­duc­tion and the improved hygien­ic con­di­tions. The Flex­Pick­er rec­og­nized and grabbed over­lap­ping pan­cakes from the con­vey­or, and then stacked them for easy pack­ing. The impress­ing sort­ing rou­tine could pack 400 pan­cakes per minute!

Pep­peridge Farm imple­ment­ed the Flex­Pick­er to auto­mate the high-risk repet­i­tive motions inher­ent in pack­ag­ing operations. 

Robots do the sand­wich­ing of choco­late in the company’s Milano cookies. 

These are just some good exam­ples of var­i­ous food han­dling man­u­fac­tur­ers who have cho­sen to auto­mate their pro­duc­tion lines.

If you’d like to learn more about the ABB Flex­Pick­ers or com­pa­ra­ble robots from oth­er brands, please con­tact Robots​.com at 877−762−6881.