How can Elite Robotics – cobots help with three-dimensional cultivation in Europe?

01 Background

The customer company was founded in 1958 and is headquartered in Leiria, Portugal, mainly engaged in the production of various plastic products.

In 1960, a new company was founded, the Oval plant, where the project is located. The business scope of our factory is to develop, produce and supply plastic products to meet the different needs of different customers in various industries. As a family-owned company that has been committed to "plastic products" for 60 years, their goal has always been to become a benchmark in the plastics industry. In addition to providing a wide range of reliable quality products to the public, they are also constantly exploring cutting-edge technologies in terms of raw materials, technological processes, and production methods.

02 Pain points

In recent years, plastic pipes for three-dimensional planting have accounted for a large proportion of the bulk orders received by customers. With the growing popularity of three-dimensional cultivation in Europe, traditional farming practices have changed. Growers simply place the soil in the pipes and place the plants, seeds, and seedlings in the openings for planting. This greatly increases the area of cultivated land and ensures sufficient water. Cultivation and multiple planting are more convenient and are more and more favored by people.

Since customers produce various types of pipes, one of the processes is to move the plastic pipe from one side to the drilling equipment, where holes are punched. This was previously done by hand. The material itself is not heavy, but workers need to turn around to pick up or place long tubes. A person may have to perform 2,000 turns a day at full load. So this position is the last thing that workers want. The plant had been considering an automated solution to replace manual operations. However, due to the frequent changes in material varieties, flexible solutions are required to meet the needs of flexible production of multiple varieties.

03 Solution

As proposed by its integrator, the customer felt that cobots could be tried and expected the integrator to carefully consider the payback cycle and choose a cost-effective solution.

Coincidentally, as a company with more than 20 years of automation experience, the integrator has been looking for a Chinese cobot partner since 2019. They are keenly aware that although the labor cost in Europe is high, the collaborative robots of European and American brands are conducive to saving labor costs, and many medium-sized factories are still more sensitive to cost. The global economy is putting increasing competitive pressure on businesses. On the one hand, the society is aging, and it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit workers. On the other hand, medium-sized companies cannot afford the high cost of purchasing equipment at one time. Therefore, the demand for flexible automation of small and medium-sized enterprises has not been fully released.

However, if they use cobots developed and manufactured by stable and reliable Chinese manufacturers, their system solutions can save a lot of money, which is very attractive to integrators and end users.

At the end of 2019, the integrator established a special department for collaborative robot automation through multi-party cooperation and began to cooperate with ELITE ROBOT engineers.

Finally, in this Leiria-based project, the customer used the collaborative robot ELITE ROBOT EC66 (6kg) for material handling. EC66 currently assists in the production of a plastic tube that is used to support the growth of soft-stemmed plants. Unsurprisingly, the cobot is compact and takes up little space when installed. The robotic arm grabs a tube on the feeding mechanism, moves it to the other side and inserts it into the casing, and then stamps it by the equipment; The robot then moves it to the unloading mechanism. The whole process takes about 10 seconds. There is no need to redeploy the production line, and the production process can be flexibly configured for different sizes of materials. It is worth noting that the overall system cost makes users quite satisfied,

The core concept of three-dimensional planting is to make the best use of everything and give full play to every inch of soil and every drop of water. Similarly, for the majority of users, the characteristics of Chinese collaborative robots, once played in the right position, can get twice the result with half the effort!
How can Elite Robotics – cobots help with three-dimensional cultivation in Europe?

How can Elite Robotics – cobots help with three-dimensional cultivation in Europe?

How can Elite Robotics – cobots help with three-dimensional cultivation in Europe?

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