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Robotic bow-tying system adds personal touch to chocolate boxes

Robotics solutions provider designs a system to wrap chocolate boxes with a ribbon and form a bow using a six-axis robot programmed to operate in a number of unusual angles.

At Esther Price Candies, a six-axis robot with controller ties ribbons around candy boxes and forms bows at 2 boxes/min.
At Esther Price Candies, a six-axis robot with controller ties ribbons around candy boxes and forms bows at 2 boxes/min.

If you’ve ever tried teaching a six-year-old how to tie a shoe, you know how complicated the task can be. Try teaching a robot how to do it. Mechatronics expert Dave Whelan, founding partner of aXatronics, has done something just as difficult. Whelan and his team developed a robotic bow-tying system for Dayton, OH-based Esther Price Fine Chocolates Candy Company that ties a ribbon around the popular chocolatier’s boxes.

Until purchasing the automated bow-tying system from aXatronics, Esther Price Candies relied on seasonal workers to tie the ribbons on each candy box by hand. The workers accomplished the job at the rate of three to four boxes per minute, with some occasionally reaching a rate of five per minute. But no single worker could tie boxes all day long. And even with breaking up the workers’ tying-time into shorter chunks through shiftwork, the workers risked injury from carpal tunnel syndrome.

To innovate its process and protect its workers, Esther Price Candies initially considered several scenarios to automate the process. But there was no reasonable, cost-effective way of mimicking a worker’s bow-tying movements without incorporating a robot. “Replicating the bow-tying movement is very difficult,” recalls Whelan. “It requires six axes of motion.”

Esther Price Candies did not call aXatronics at first. Instead, the company contacted a machine builder experienced with the candy industry. The machine builder attempted to build a robotic solution, which resulted in a sporadically produced bow-tied box every couple of minutes. But the process was not repeatable. After several attempts to perfect an automated bow-tying system, the machine builder realized the challenge was too complex.

In 2014, Esther Price Candies contacted Yaskawa Motoman, which in turn tapped its integration partner, aXatronics. As aXatronics studied the bow-tying challenge and previous vendor’s approach, the team saw that the robot constructed by the machine builder was too large for the application and slower than what Yaskawa could provide. The larger robot could not easily fit within the space requirements and could not use its full range of motion within the given workspace.

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