Robot takes 'load' off workers

Forbes Chocolate eliminated a production bottleneck when it replaced manual palletizing of multiwall bags with a robotic palletizer.

Mechanical clamp tool captures a multiwall bag for loading onto a pallet at Forbes Chocolate's Cleveland plant.
Mechanical clamp tool captures a multiwall bag for loading onto a pallet at Forbes Chocolate's Cleveland plant.

Forbes Chocolate has been a fixture in Cleveland business for more than 100 years. It’s been operating in its current plant for 15 years, and its growing business as an ingredient supplier to food processors has put plant space at a premium. So when Forbes’ management looked to convert from manual to automatic palletizing, its options were as limited as its plant floorspace.

“Our operation is definitely space-challenged,” says Keith Geringer, vice president at Forbes. “The space we had available ruled out just about everything but robotic palletizers. A robot was the better fit.”

Company representatives had seen robotic palletizers demonstrated at several food expositions in recent years. So the company contacted manufacturers of palletizers before it settled on a system from Fanuc Robotics that was installed late last year. The system consists of the Model M-410iB robot, infeed conveyor, pallet accumulation conveyor, bag handling end-of-arm tooling, and Fanuc’s iPendant, the operator interface panel.

Forbes’ goal was twofold: improve its production throughput by eliminating the bottleneck of manual palletizing, and relieve employees of a tedious, heavy-lifting operation. The company’s main bagging line feeds sacks to the palletizer in weights ranging from 16 to 60 lb. Four different bag sizes and styles are filled on the line, so the palletizer and its bag-handling tool had to be able to handle a variety of sizes.

Even more important to Forbes, the company wanted the system to be installed by the end of 2003 for accounting purposes. “When we contacted Fanuc, we explained our timeline on this,” Geringer recalls. “They sent an engineer in to see our plant and take measurements. They came to us with a proposal in early October of last year. Once we agreed, they built the system, we shipped sample bags for them to test, and we had a demonstration at Fanuc’s facility.”

Forbes’ people went to the trial expecting that plant personnel would install the palletizer. Once they saw it, they decided to have Fanuc install the system at Forbes with plant personnel working alongside. “When they installed it, we worked closely with them, and they showed us everything we needed to understand to operate it,” Geringer says. In fact, he says, no one from the plant has yet undergone formal training on it, although Forbes’ plant manager will probably receive advanced training this winter.

“Operating the system is so easy even I can do it,” Geringer quips.

The requirements

The variety of bag sizes and two sizes of pallets complicated the plans for the palletizer, says Steve LaMarre, the Fanuc sales representative. For example, the pneumatic cylinder that pushes an empty pallet into the loading position was engineered and built to contact only the wood pallet. That’s because when the pallet is staged by the operator, a corrugated tray is set up and stapled to the pallet. The tray has sidewalls that are about 6” high, so it could be damaged if the positioning cylinder came into contact with it.

The plant ships loads on both standard Grocery Manufacturers of America 48”x40” pallet sizes and European pallets that are a bit smaller. So the dimensions of the tray provide the “target” for robotic loading.

The robot is a high-speed, four-axis robot designed for palletizing. It’s the 160-kg version that’s the lightest version of three sizes, but LaMarre calls it “perfectly adequate” for this application. The mechanical bag-handling tool has what Fanuc calls “adjustable whips,” but LaMarre says that the sizes of Forbes bags are similar enough not to require adjustment.

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