Collaborative Robot for Tote Handling

Impetus to Invent

Collaborative robots can work very well side by side with people, and this project demonstrates that perfectly. Our customer has a wide variety of parts that need to be removed from totes, which is an ideal task for a person. However, moving totes into the pick position for the operator and returning them to a tall stack is not a great task for a person to do. So, Invent Automation deployed a collaborative robot to do the heavy lifting and alleviate this burden from the operator. The robot uses machine vision to safely unstack and present a tote to the operator, then return the finished tote to the custom outbound conveyor system. By incorporating a custom and innovative inbound and outbound lane of totes, the operator is always fed parts and never has to do any heavy lifting

Problem Solved

Repetitive lifting of totes by the operator

Lessons Learned

Safety barriers are still necessary if a person is working very close with a collaborative robot.

What Was Unique

An electrically actuated drawbridge (think Murphy bed) had to be designed and deployed to give maintenance the ability to access the nearby equipment during heavy maintenance.

What Was Challenging

We had to place our conveyor system in a very tight area between the isle way and the equipment. A lot of automation was packed in a very tight area.