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Low-hanging fruit for robot applications

15 March 2024

End-of-line applications have most potential to be automated with robots in the near term for robots in food manufacturing, says Barry Weller.

Traditionally, food manufacturers have faced significant challenges when deploying robotics in their manufacturing processes. With low margins and often short contracts on offer from their customers, the supermarkets, the payback period required, which can be as little as 12 months, makes it difficult to justify any new investment.

In addition, environmental issues encountered on food production lines –such as cold, damp and washing requirements – have made automation challenging in some areas. 

A combination of factors is likely to see robot uptake increase in the coming years. A shortage of labour, rising inflation and its impact on wages, and an ageing workforce, are all driving the search for new solutions. 

Many manufacturers, working in sectors with significant spikes in seasonal demand, are also starting to view automation as a solution to help smooth out the impact that highs and lows can have on the bottom line, compared to manual labour.

However, flexible automation solutions at the packaging line level really are the potential near-term low hanging fruit, particularly where speed, flexibility and adaptability are the key to keeping up with changes in customer demand.

End-of-line packaging is traditionally a highly manual area of a food production, but the big manufacturers are producing the sort of volumes that make the investment case much easier for applications as diverse as bagging, weighing and palletising.

What’s more, easy-to-use software tools are now making system design much easier. Rather than having to program the robot, the manufacturer inputs pallet size and box size and the software is able to work out the best pattern for the robot to stack in the most efficient way – saving both time and money.

In the medium-term, over the next 10 years, I can see the drive into using robots starting to filter down into smaller batch sizes requiring fast task changeovers that have traditionally been regarded as being outside of the scope for robots.

Barry Weller is product manager at Mitsubishi Electric Automation Systems.


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