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Vision system speeds syringe filling

Designed to aid compounding pharmacies in precise robotic picking of loose syringes, this Smart Table vision system is more than just an accessory.

The Smart Table is backlit to take advantage of a smart vision system that takes chromatic shift into account for precision robotic picking.
The Smart Table is backlit to take advantage of a smart vision system that takes chromatic shift into account for precision robotic picking.

FP Developments is a privately-owned pharmaceutical material handling OEM that has a 60-year history of providing equipment for syringe filling and handling, vial filling and handling, mark and verify, track-and-trace, unique device identification (UDI), and the like. The company has a strong installed base for its robotic syringe filler, which uses a Universal Robots UR-3 robotic arm to perform aseptic syringe filling and capping. The machine is primarily used in specific pharmaceutical environments like hospital pharmacies and clean-room pharmacies.

“In these environments, we frequently see pharmacy technicians loading the syringes by hand into the tray,” says Ryan Stote, Systems Integrator, FP Developments. “If you have a 200-syringe run, it takes the user quite a while to load those trays. So we came up with a solution to take the hand-loading out of it and free up the technician. We use the UR-3 because, like the name implies, it is truly universal. It is easy to integrate, and the user interface is intuitive.”

The company’s new Smart Table is marketed as an accessory to the filler. It is a backlit flat-surface table with RGB colors to demonstrate chromatic shift during object position detection. “If you’re doing something that requires a certain backlight color, you have the red, green, blue, and white,” Stote says.

He says many customers don’t understand chromatic shift, and how different wavelengths of light focus at different points. Position detection with the precision required by robotic syringe-filling can be affected by available light—the Smart Table accounts for this.

“With a system like this as a demo, you can trigger it once, show customers the position of the syringe, change the backlight, trigger it again, and show them the actual shift in position,” Stote says.

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