A full turnkey, two robot cell that strips, empties and washes returnable containers around the clock, in a space that was never designed with a robot cell in mind.
Six different lid types, no fixed order, and a process that had to run twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, with no changeover window to hide behind.
Our customer needed a cell that could take a sealed, returnable container off a line, strip its lid, empty it, and wash it, ready to go round again. Straightforward as a sentence - considerably harder as a machine, because the containers were never presented in a fixed order, and between them there were six different lid types, all needing to come off cleanly, on the same line, with the same equipment. The environment was harsh, the contents needed careful handling at every stage, and the whole process had to run continuously. It either worked, every time, or it stopped a process that could not afford to stop.
Rather than force the line into a fixed sequence just to make the automation simpler, we designed the cell to cope with whatever arrived next. Containers are identified on the way in, at a scan station ahead of the first robot, so the cell always knows what it is picking up before it commits to a movement. We supplied the full turnkey system: two robots, each carrying a tool we designed and built in house. The first carries our adaptive lid pick head, removing whichever of the six lid types the scan station has identified. The second carries an adaptive bin pick tool, lifting the container, emptying it at a dedicated dump station, and loading it into the wash enclosure before it exits, dried, at a blower station on the way out.
This was not a greenfield line laid out on a blank floor plan - the room was already fixed, and everything had to be arranged inside it without compromising access, maintenance, or the safety case.