Pick and place articulated robot for the food industry
max. 240 p/min Gerhard Schubert GmbH

In Japan, slices of bread are lightly toasted or baked twice. There are differences in size and shape from one slice of bread to another. The task was to transfer 240 slices of bread per minute from the cooling tunnel, place two slices on top of each other in the chain of the Fuji flow-wrap machine and make sure that the upper slice is always the smaller of the two. Placing the slices of bread in this fashion is necessary in order to not mislead the consumer.

There is nothing better than a Schubert TLM picker line for solving this task: A TLM picker line which synchronizes with the infeed chain of the flow-wrap bag machine with an average speed of 305 mm a second. The slices of bread enter the machine via a continuously running conveyor belt. The art of the picker line is to adapt it to the product flow in such a way that all good products are picked up from the belt and, in spite of irregular production, to ensure that no packages are empty or partially filled. TLM picker lines have been developed for this purpose, with their patented counter-directional workflow and their control design. This design allows the robot arms to independently coordinate which one places what component where. A gripper, specially developed for Harada, picks up each slice of bread after it has run through the TLM image processing system. The difficulty here was that the slices of bread are extremely breakable. Anything that does not meet the quality specifications or is not an exact match is left lying on the belt.