Tag: automation|pallets|warehouse automation

Robotics and automation specialist RMGroup has installed three of its end-of-line robotic palletisers for award-winning soft drinks business Radnor Hills. The move has enabled the manufacturer to benefit from process efficiencies throughout its production.

Manufacturing a wide range of spring waters, flavoured waters, functional waters, school compliant drinks, premium sparkling pressés, fruit juices and own-label brands, Radnor Hills first approached RMGroup in 2018 to investigate automating an end-of-line palletising operation with a robot arm.

On the line, packs of bottles needed to be palletised at a rate of 14 packs per minute. Given the throughput and pallet stack formats, RMGroup needed to ensure that the robotic solution could multi pick packs up to four at any one time, and then place them onto a pallet in ones, twos, threes or fours, to keep up with the production line throughput.

By using ABB robot studio, RMGroup’s mechanical design and technical department recommended the use of a bespoke gripper, thereby enabling the robot to stack the packs onto pallets at the desired rate. Robot studio also helped RMGroup to decide which ABB robot would be best suited for the project, thereby optimising the ROI.

Following the success of the initial installation, RMGroup has since supplied another two ABB end-of line palletisers at the site. A second was installed on Radnor’s tetra pack line, the requirement being to palletise cardboard cartons from dual production lines at a rate of six cases per minute; a third line was installed on Radnor’s canning line, involving a much higher output of 24 packs, 12 of which needed to be palletised on euro pallets, at 20 cases per minute.

“The benefits of working with RMGroup and what we feel they particularly do well, is first and foremost they listen to us,” said David Pope, Radnor Hills’ general manager. “They take on board our requirements – they don’t tell us what we should be doing, they listen and come back with us with solutions to make it happen. The whole team has been a pleasure to work with, especially the engineers, who have been extremely knowledgeable and helpful throughout the whole process.”

William Watkins, Radnor Hills’ managing director, added: “I think RMGroup’s experience, their backup and the fact that they have a very conscientious team, means that they really make sure that they don’t leave you until you are absolutely 100% happy that the machinery they’ve installed is working absolutely as you expect it to.”

With the new Smart Pallet Mover (SPM), Interroll has launched a solution that can be adapted as a flexible and modular pallet management system to meet a wide range of application requirements in industrial manufacturing.

The customer and user benefits of the Smart Pallet Mover are impressive: Those who use it can now finally automate work processes in front of the machine production to avoid manual activities in safety-critical areas and manage the pallet work flow by buffering, sorting, sequencing and carrying at the right time to deliver significant improvement of the machine down time optimising the return on investment (ROI) of the machine production cells.

This not only eliminates costly production interruptions for material supply to machines, but also the risk of accidents during operation. In this way, productivity increases of up to 30% are possible compared to manual operation.

The Smart Pallet Mover is a pallet management solution for automating pallet transport in the vicinity of manufacturing machines and for production-related picking and sequencing processes, which can also be used in Industry 4.0 environments. The SPM is designed to transport, sort and buffer boxes or pallets weighing up to 1,000kg. It represents a mobile and autonomously acting material flow system that can be used, for example, as a cost-efficient supplement or substitute for forklifts or automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

The Smart Pallet Mover solution consists of various modules. The centre of the solution is a mobile unit (SM1000 Mover) that runs underneath non-driven conveyor sections and moves pallets lying on them. A transfer car (SM2000 Transfer Car) which moves on a rail can transport pallets between parallel conveyor sections.

“With this platform solution, which is unparalleled on the world market, we are tapping into the great productivity potential offered by production-related pallet management automation for our customers and users. A user-friendly 3D online tool, the SPM Layout Configurator & Pallet Flow Simulator, makes it possible to configure a system quickly and easily as well as simulate planned operation on the computer,” explains Jens Strüwing, Executive Vice President Products & Technology at Interroll.

The flexibility of this innovative solution, the use of proven technologies and a very short payback period ensure that users can significantly strengthen their competitiveness. As with all Interroll products, the Smart Pallet Mover is extremely easy to install, operate and maintain. The modular plug-and-play solution can therefore be put into operation without lengthy interruptions to production, even during modernisation projects.

Networking capabilities based on global data standards such as REST API and JSON ensure maximum compatibility and ease of use. The conveyor modules can be reconfigured very easily if required, and height-adjustable supports allow the system to be installed even on uneven floors.

Before the official market launch, the new solution had already won two internationally renowned awards. The Smart Pallet Mover won the Red Dot Award, Product Design 2021, for its exceptional design quality and degree of innovation. At the same time, the solution was chosen by the independent experts of the “International Intralogistics and Forklift Truck of the Year Award (IFOY AWARD)” in March 2021 as a finalist of this globally renowned intralogistics award.

With this new offering, Interroll is taking into account the fact that production managers are increasingly focusing on material handling, as shown, for example, by the survey “Production Logistics in Medium-Sized Businesses,” which Interroll published last year: The average degree of automation of internal material transport at the companies surveyed was only 53%. Almost every tenth company (9%) had a degree of automation of less than 25%.