We designed and built a fully integrated bar packing line for a long-standing customer of ours, and New Zealand’s most loved ice cream brand, Tip Top.
Challenge
Tip Top 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.
- Erect, load and close four carton sizes.
- Feed these into a case packer with the ability to pack the cartons into five shipper SKUs
- All of this at 300 ice creams per minute
The delicate nature of the chocolate skin on the bars meant we had to be as gentle as possible. In addition, everything needed to fit into a small footprint.
Solution
This solution utilises High Speed Delta robot hardware and 3D AI vision systems. Containing four, four-axis delta robots controlled by Beckhoff IPC and servo control technology. We used 3D vision for performance requirements.
High speed 3D product scanning and RML’s 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 out making this a 30-axis machine
It is critical that the ice creams are 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 period. 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 the product quality is maintained.
