Automatic box palletizer

The pattern is how the boxes are laid out on the pallet: how they are placed and how they fit together in each layer.

It matters for one very specific reason: the pattern determines how many boxes the robot can pick in a single movement. And that is what decides real throughput.

If your output is high, the pattern is decisive. If it is low, do not worry too much about it: the robot picks two at a time and that is more than enough.

Between 15 and 20 seconds, and in many cases it is effectively immediate.

The change is made from the HMI, the installation’s control screen: you select the format you want to run, and that is it.

And here is something worth knowing before you buy: if you work with many formats, we teach you to create your own. We provide training on straightforward, intuitive programming so that your people can set up new formats without depending on us. In a plant with a lot of product rotation, that is worth more than any catalogue figure.

We do not use forks. The two real options are:

• Vacuum: a suction plate or suction cups.
• Mechanical gripper: clamp-type gripper.

Which one to choose depends on the product type and on the output.

And here is the warning almost nobody gives: vacuum looks like the safer option on paper, and it is not always. The quality of the cardboard can make it less than fully reliable. So when vacuum is on the table, you have to run tests with your real cardboard and your real boxes, not with an assumption. A suction cup that grips good cardboard perfectly can fail on cardboard that is porous or badly glued.

Not at all. It is the norm. Most of our customers do not have one format, they have many.

The cell is designed for all the formats present and future, not for the one you happen to be running on the day of the visit. That is precisely the engineering work: sizing for your range of boxes, not for one box.

We will tell you straight: the robot has the same limitation a person palletizing by hand has. If a box arrives badly sealed or the cardboard has gone soft, automating does not make the problem go away. Neither by hand nor automatically is there any guarantee that this sorts itself out.

What you can do is control it. Safety, protection and inspection measures are built in so those situations never reach the pick point: the defective box is removed before palletizing, checked by hand and put back into the line afterwards.

In other words: automation does not fix a bad box, but it stops a bad box ruining the whole pallet.

Yes. That falls under automatic case packing, and a complete case packing and palletizing line can run continuously.

Any control systems you need can also be built in: weight verification, labelling and the rest of the end-of-line checks.

As far as you want. The palletizing robot is one part of an end of line that can be fully automated:

• Automatic empty pallet feed.
• Automatic stretch wrapper once the pallet is built.
• Weight verification and labelling.
• Evacuation of the finished pallet.

The usual approach is to start with palletizing and leave room to grow. What matters is deciding that at the design stage, not once the cell is installed.

Yes, automatically.

You program how many layers go between slip sheets, and that setting sits inside the product recipe itself. So when you change product on the screen, the slip sheet setting changes with it: nobody has to remember anything and nobody has to touch the program.

The fact that it is boxes is not what moves the price: what moves it is the production speed and the degree of automation of the line. The three brackets, with what each one includes, are on our palletizing robot price ranges.