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Pick and place robots
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Pick & Place
Pick and place robots: picking and placing solutions
Accuracy and speed for efficient production
At Rivas Robotics we design and implement high-speed, high-precision pick & place robots, ideal for fast handling of light products in industrial environments. Integrated with machine vision, our solutions deliver agility, efficiency and maximum accuracy on every movement.
If the part is large or heavy and what you need is to load and unload a machine, that is a machine tending robot.
Catalogue
Pick & place robot applications
Our systems are designed to optimise a wide variety of industrial processes, including:
✅ Tray loading – precise placing of products into trays at high speed.
✅ Automatic case packing – integration with packaging systems for maximum efficiency.
✅ Product sorting and grouping – intelligent separation by specific characteristics.
✅ Multiple handling – the ability to carry out several tasks simultaneously.
The advantages of our pick & place robots
Ultra-high speeds: agile processing for demanding production lines.
Extreme accuracy: exact handling with a minimal margin of error.
Machine vision integration: automatic identification and positioning of products.
Process optimisation: shorter times and better operating efficiency.
Full customisation: we adapt every system to your industry’s specific requirements.
Technology adapted to many sectors
Our pick & place robots are the right solution for industries such as:
🔹 Food and beverage – fast, safe handling of perishable products.
🔹 Pharmaceutical and cosmetics – hygienic processes with maximum precision.
🔹 Electronics – sorting and assembly of delicate components.
🔹 Logistics and distribution – automation of repetitive tasks for greater efficiency.
Automate your production with the latest technology
At Rivas Robotics we develop custom pick & place systems to improve efficiency, cut costs and optimise production processes.
Get in touch with no obligation and find out how to take your production to the next level.
What is a pick and place application?
It is handling a light product, at very high speed, and placing it somewhere else.
Do not confuse it with palletizing. Palletizing builds the pallet at the end of the line, with boxes or bags, and the result is a load ready to ship. Pick and place works with loose product, before or inside the process, and the result is product sorted and placed where the next machine needs it.
It is solved with SCARA robots or with delta robots, also called spider robots. These are machines built to move very fast with very little payload — exactly the opposite of a palletizing robot.
Which products are handled with a pick and place robot?
Small parts, in the order of grams: meat, biscuits, bakery, screws, plastic items. Usually raw product or product at its first stage of processing.
And there are two ways of using it, which in practice are two different projects:
Sorting and positioning. The product arrives loose and the robot places it in the right position: either correctly oriented for the next automated step, or straight into a blister, a box or whatever the packaging is.
Feeding the case packer. Here the pick and place is integrated into a case packing solution: it picks the product coming off the filling line — arriving badly positioned because of the belt movement itself — and inserts it into the case. See the Rivas Robotics automatic case packing solutions
How fast does a pick and place robot work?
Between 50 and 70 units per minute. That is a little under a second per movement.
That figure is the whole point of these robots, and it is worth comparing with the rest: a collaborative robot palletizing manages around 4 units per minute, limited by safety regulations. They are both called “robot”, but they are not playing the same game.
How much weight can a pick and place robot handle?
There is a catalogue figure and a real figure, and they are not the same.
The delta robot lifts 3 kg at most. But the gripper weighs a kilo and a half or two, and that weight counts too. What is left available for the product is grams.
In practice: 100 to 300 grams per piece, and half a kilo at the very most. Not much more.
It is the same misreading people make with collaborative robots, where the 15 kg ceiling also includes the gripper. When you look at a datasheet, always ask how much the tooling weighs: it is half the answer.
Do you need machine vision?
In 95% of cases yes — arguably 100%.
The reason is simple: those parts always arrive out of order. They come off a filling line or an earlier process and reach the belt in any position. The robot needs to know exactly where each part is and how it is oriented before going for it.
Without vision, the robot can only pick product that already arrives perfectly placed — and that case barely exists.
I work with unpackaged food product. What changes?
Everything changes, and it has to be on the table from the start of the project.
In food, the product is handled after it is finished but before primary packaging — in other words, unpacked product. That means direct food contact, so every element that touches it has to comply with the relevant regulations and be stainless.
And above all: the design is not limited to picking and placing the product. You have to solve how the empty containers are fed, how they are filled, how they leave the cell and at what speed each part runs. The pick and place application is one piece inside a complete automation system, and it is the whole that has to be sized.
When is a pick and place not worth it?
When output is low.
It is worth saying plainly: pick and place is among the most expensive applications in robotics. If your throughput is small and your production volume is low, the investment does not add up, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a cell you will never pay off.
If output is high, the next thing to look at is weight. If the parts exceed what a robot of this type can handle, the answer is other handling systems, not a pick and place forced into the job.
Tell us what the product is, what it weighs and what throughput you run at, and we will tell you straight whether this is your application or not.