Pneumatic Products was approached by a sausage manufacturer to solve an issue with the reliability of their cocktail sausage robotic cartoner.
The problem:
The existing robots vacuum system was not picking the packs reliably, causing missed picks and down time. The pickup surface is highly variable due to the shrink-wrapped nature of the packs and therefore achieving a consistently secure grip of the packs was proving troublesome.
Investigation:
Our vacuum specialist team swung into action investigating if there were other vacuum cup options that could handle the pickup surface. Trials were done but ultimately it did not bring the improvements they were looking for.
We then contacted our supply partner, JOULIN, for help. We discussed possible solutions and ran trials of different foam pad vacuum gripper options and, working in collaboration with the customers engineers, eventually found the best solution to interface with the existing robot and vacuum supply system. One challenge was to find a very light weight solution to suit the existing robot payload.
The solution:
JOULIN designed and manufactured custom foam pad vacuum grippers from carbon fibre. It was designed to retrofit with the mounting points of the existing robots, so it was quick and easy to upgrade.
The result:
The solution worked out of the box! The new JOULIN custom foam pad grippers proved to be far more accurate and reliable and has resulted in an exceptional performance improvement for our customer on this packing line. The customer is extremely happy with what has been achieved.