Intermittent Top Load Cartoner

Challenge

TipTop has purchased four machine solutions from us in the past. Due to the success of our past collaborations, we were selected to work on their latest project. The challenge was to design, manufacture, and deliver four machines customised to suit Tip Top’s requirements. The brief was to erect, load, and close four carton sizes; and feed these into a case packer with the ability to pack the cartons into five shipper SKUs; with all of this being done at 300 ice creams per minute. In addition, everything needed to fit into a small footprint. The delicate nature of the chocolate skin on the bars meant we had to be as gentle as possible.

Solution

The solution now utilises Codian robot hardware and Gocator 3D vision systems – and contains four, four-axis delta robots controlled by Beckhoff IPC and servo control technology. Typically, we use a 2D system for applications like this, but we found the 3D system gave us better results across the range of ice creams. High-speed 3D product scanning and the RML software platform allow upwards of 300 ice creams to be scanned, tracked, picked, and then placed into cartons.

There is a 6-axis robot positioned at each end of the system, one to deliver empty cartons in, and one to empty packed cartons making this a 30-axis machine. The ice creams must be only held in the machine very briefly, as they degrade quickly if they are not packed and sent to the blast freezers within a set time. Logic has been written into the systems code to ensure we balance out the delivery of cartons from the loader through to the case packer and into the freezers, to ensure that product quality is maintained.