Robotic pick and place - the ultimate challenge

 RTS, the innovative UK provider of vision-guided Robotic Palletizing system to the food industry, developed a system to pick Poppadums in order to automate a heavily labour-intensive process.

Could a robot pick up a poppadum without breaking it? Could it pick up four in succession and put them down together? Could it do this at 100 picks per minute, 24 hours per day, seven days per week with a very low breakage rate? It might seem impossible, but RTS Flexible Systems have proved it can be done - and that the installed system can deliver a healthy Return on Investment in less than two years, by significantly reducing labour costs over three shifts and increasing production capacity RTS, the innovative UK provider of vision-guided robotic automation pick and place systems to the food industry, developed the system in response to a challenge to replace a heavily labour-intensive process.

Individual poppadums were manually Pick and Place Systems , having been delivered from a frying machine by conveyor, then stacked into piles of four.

The piles then needed to be manually picked again and placed into a vacuum forming machine.

Using a combination of RTS Pixcell vision systems and ABB Flexpicker robots, the RTS system is able to collect four poppadums one by one from the conveyor and place them for packaging in the vacuum forming machine.

It is also capable of handling multiple product variants for variety packs.

The key to the solution is the end-effector technology, which enables the poppadums to be handled extremely gently.

Also key was the ability of the RTS vision software to determine which poppadums can be picked successfully from the conveyor by instructing the robot to avoid any that are on top of, or overlapped with another.