Case | Everyone has a love for beauty, and so does automation

Background:

One of Europe's leading cosmetics companies, its factory in China is also facing challenges due to high labor costs. In the later process of the production line, most of the workers carry out the production operation in a manual way, such as when it comes to the packaging and palletizing process, which often brings a heavy labor load to the workers - for example, due to frequent waist turning or undulating heavy work, it is easy to cause health risks caused by "anti-ergonomics". From an economic point of view, with the increasing frequency of product batch changeovers, there is a need for more flexible production methods – that is, to meet the production mode of large quantities and high varieties under the existing production line layout. As a result, there is a requirement for production equipment that is easier to operate and change, more flexible to deploy, and even safer to interact with workers on the production line.

Pain point:

Based on the experience in Europe and previous ergonomic risk analysis, the Chinese factory quickly realized that workers would need to do more manual work in the assembly and packaging of the production end-of-line. In the palletizing process, for example, workers have to put boxes of different specifications in each batch on pallets. The advantage of a single person working per hour can be up to 1,000 kilograms, and if calculated on an 8-hour shift, workers need to pick up and place items with a total weight of up to 8,000 kilograms. This is almost the highest level of ergonomic hazards within the customer, and working at this intensity for a long time will cause serious damage to the human body. In addition, Chinese factories are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit workers who are willing to work permanently and reliably in such heavy jobs, even though they have increased wages for the job by 30% in 2019. On the production side, it is often complained that the turnover of personnel affects work efficiency, and on-site training of personnel has to be carried out repeatedly.

In fact, this kind of customer problem is not uncommon in other industries. The conventional automation solution is to replace manual labor with traditional industrial robots. At the input and output end of the production line, industrial robots are deployed for destacking and palletizing operations, which are used to replenish materials to the production line, or to transfer semi-finished products or finished products. However, the problem with industrial robots is that they take into account the space utilization of the production line and some practical constraints – including the structure of the building, such as the spacing between columns. Once the destacking and palletizing operation station designed by traditional industrial robots is deployed, its layout cannot be greatly adjusted or even completely adjusted. This obviously cannot meet the needs of customers for rapid switching between multiple varieties.

Solution:

Flexible and compact, sharing the workspace with people collaborative robots have great advantages, the general standard pallet is 0.8-1.2m square, the height of the stomping is less than 1.8m; the selection of fixed installation and meet the requirements of the working range of robots, will use hundreds of kilograms of industrial robots, high weight, large volume, need to install safety fences, it is difficult to adapt to the layout of the production line, can not be installed in a small space; Although the cobot may not be able to meet the height requirements in terms of arm span, due to its light weight and flexible installation, it can complete the application of depalletizing without additional space and cost without additional space and cost, improving the overall efficiency of the factory and improving the working environment of workers due to its light weight and flexible installation.

The final customer chose the Elite EC612 collaborative robot (arm span 1304mm, maximum payload 12kg). During the test, the robot ran at 50% speed, and the pick-and-place time to complete 1 carton was 15 seconds; If running at full speed, it will take a total of 95 seconds to complete the stacking of this stack. It is worth noting that the advantage of cobots is that they can quickly realize the planning and debugging of robot motion trajectories through interactive programming of the teach pendant and drag-and-drop teaching, thereby greatly shortening the project integration cycle. In practice, when a product batch is changed, the customer can quickly recall a pre-set program and fine-tune the points so that the robot can start working according to the new palletizing requirements.

Tips:

Elite robot adopts standard interface, through flange IO or 485 communication interface, control box IO or network port, 485 communication interface can be adapted to the common end effectors of major manufacturers in the market (including pneumatic, electric gripper, air suction, electric vacuum suction actuator). The customer is engaged in a business related to beauty (cosmetics), and the introduction of collaborative robots makes life and production better.

Case | Everyone has a love for beauty, and so does automation

Case | Everyone has a love for beauty, and so does automation

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