Packaging News

I believe the food industry is undergoing a robotic revolution," says Nigel Smith, managing director of TM (Toshiba Machine) Robotics (Europe). "Just as the automotive sector became heavily automated in the 1970s, so the late noughties brought a scramble among food manufacturers to invest in the most efficient and future-proofed robots on the market."

To talk of a robotic revolution may be over-egging it slightly, but it is certainly true that the food and drink industry is one of the fastest growing markets for robotics installations. According to the British Automation and Robotics Association (BARA), in 2009, for the first time sales of robots to UK food manufacturers beat those to every other sector. They accounted for 20% of all installations and 94 unit sales were logged.

"Shorter product lifecycles and the need for improved manufacturing flexibility are fuelling the growth of robotics in the food and drink industry," says Stirling Paatz, managing director of Barr & Paatz, integrator for a number of robot brands, including Mitsubishi, ABB and Festo. "With packaging formats and presentations constantly changing and mixed or ‘rainbow' packs in greater demand, the industry is looking favourably upon the inherent flexibility, faster changeovers and operating precision that robots can deliver."

However, in comparison to other countries, the UK still lags behind in terms of market penetration. The International Federation of Robotics estimates the number of robots per 10,000 people employed in UK manufacturing at below 50, compared with a European average of over 100.

So although there is some evidence that forward-looking UK food manufacturers are increasingly investing in robots, there are still many companies who have yet to be convinced of their benefits.

"This is due to a number of factors, including low labour rates, particularly immigrant labour, the ruthless nature of the supermarkets - making it difficult to guarantee long-term capital investments - and a significantly more positive attitude to automation in Europe," says Derek Pasquire, senior sales manager with manufacturer and supplier of industrial robots and factory automation Motoman.

ABB's channel partner manager Alan Spreckley, meanwhile, thinks the way in which many UK firms justify investment in automation is all wrong. "They tend to look at how much the equipment costs and how much labour they will save and divide one by the other," he says. "In other countries a lot of companies take 10 or even 20 factors into account, including the improvements in product quality, savings on energy, cost of floor space, giveaway and wastage and actual cost of employing people."

Misplaced perceptions
Other reservations centre on people's perceptions robots are complicated, according to TM Robotics' Nigel Smith. "The most common reason I'm given for a company not automating is the complexity of the robots and software," he says. He adds that he assuages these concerns by pointing out that far from being difficult to use, the advantage of Toshiba Machine robots lies in their ease of use.

"The software is easy to programme, which means machines can be retrained when a line ceases manufacturing one product and moves on to another; the equipment is easy to install, meaning that downtime is minimised during the integration process; and, above all, the cost and potential return on investment is easy to estimate, providing you know what your existing costs are."

Simulation tools, which allow potential buyers to try before they buy by creating in a PC-environment the actual robot programmes that are going to do the job, are also helping to allay fears around investing in robots.

"One of the areas where we are doing a lot of work is computer simulation, where firms can model the processes they currently have, identify problems, then change and benchmark the results," says BARA president Mike Wilson, who is also chairman of the Centre for Food, Robotics and Automation's (CenFRA's) technical advisory group.

CenFRA is now offering a simulation service, which he says costs money, but nothing like the outlay for an automation project. "You might invest £5,000 and get a good idea of where to go forward - much better than investing £300,000 and getting bad results."

Similarly, Barr & Paatz offers a fixed price robot workcell simulation package for £1,500, which includes computerised design of the layout, specifying hardware and peripherals and a 3D animation of how the application would perform.

Historically, robots were mainly installed at the end of food lines, for carrying out case packing and palletising operations. However, this is changing, with an increasing number deployed for primary packaging functions.

As an example of the type of advancement that is driving the adoption of automated technology further upstream, Cama has introduced a four-axis delta robot with vision inspection, which it says has enabled it to win orders that require the system to make a decision on which products are picked and then placed into the moving infeed of a flow wrapper or end-load cartoner.

"This is particularly important when a customer requires a certain combination of variants in a multi-pack or carton," says Cama Group's UK operations director Chris Rayner.

But according to Roland Czuday, product manager of delta robot systems with Sigpack Systems, a Bosch Packaging Technology company, there is still much to be done in the automation of the interface between primary and secondary packaging.

While almost all food products can be picked and placed, there are a few that present particular challenges, he says.

"Handling fruit and vegetables presents particular challenges because each item is different, not uniform," he says. "Nowadays, though, vision-guided robots offer a solution. This area is not very automated yet, but offers an opportunity for development."

Motoman's Derek Pasquire, meanwhile, says among the most difficult products are bags of peas, particularly if they are chilled not frozen and therefore have no uniform shape or rigidity for handling. However, he says even these can be robotically packed with specialist gripper technology.

Pancakes to poppadoms
Essentially, with a combination of vision technology and the right gripper, any item can be picked and placed. "We have robots handling very fragile products like pancakes and poppadoms," says ABB's Alan Spreckley. "It's purely the type of tooling and advances in vision technology that enables those sorts of jobs to be done."

According to Barr & Paatz, the gripper market is developing applications at both ends of the spectrum - meeting demand for tooling with greater payload capacity, as well as for smaller, lighter and fragile applications requiring advanced tactile functionality. One recent innovation is Festo's FinGripper, which mimics bionic design principles to adapt its grip to the object being picked. "This shows the way for sorting products of different shapes and sizes in the food and drink industry," says Paatz.

Other recent gripper developments include intelligent vacuum tools which only draw a vacuum on areas of surface where a vacuum seal is possible and use servo-controlled hands to apply the appropriate amount of force to lift a product without damage, according to Motoman.

Bosch says another way in which grippers are advancing is that they now offer automatic tool-changing capabilities, allowing the robot to automatically change the gripper if the product is changed. It also says advanced grippers can be automatically cleaned.

Brillopak has developed a range of grippers specifically for the food packaging industry. These include heads which can pick up different crates and boxes, heads which use magnets to pick up metal food cans and lightweight grippers which can pick and place individual bags of vegetables.

All this innovation means there's very little robots can't do. In fact, the only limitations seem to be in the minds of people unable to look beyond initial capital cost to the benefits robots bring.