Remtec Meets Challenges in Candy Pouch Picking Application

Remtec has developed applications that improve productivity and accuracy for many types of operations using advanced picking robot systems from FANUC. A great example is the M-3iA 4-axis Robot, which is being used in this application for the picking of randomized pouches of candy and placing them into buckets on a continuous infeed conveyor.

This high speed robotic picking system feeds pouches from bulk, automatically orients them and supplies them to a cartoner infeed at rates up to 90 pouches per minute. The system is designed to operate in three modes:

• Picks from semi-random pouches straight from the pouching operation
• Picks pouches from a hopper fed buffer conveyor with a pouch flattener
• Combined mode – direct or hopper fed

Incorporated into the robotic system is FANUC iRVision Visual Line Tracking, which is the sophisticated vision system that locates pouches to be picked.  In this application, a black belt is used on the pick conveyor, which allows the iRVision to be configured so that white, silver metalic, and clear pouches can be picked with one vision process. The system is also capable of rejecting crushed or overlapping pouches. The rejected pouches are efficiently rerouted back to the hopper, where they are flattened and reintroduced into the process via buffer conveyor.

In this application, the cartoner conveyor is also being tracked by a separate encoder and fed to the robot controller, making this a dual tracking application.

To learn more about this application or to discuss your robotic automation needs, contact us today!