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Cobot fits meat processor’s floor space and budget requirements

Taking up less than two square feet and needing no guarding, a collaborative robot with a 20-lb payload capacity is the perfect solution to Nortura’s floor-space and budget challenges.

Comprised only of a robot arm, vision camera, and end effector, the collaborative robot at Nortura takes up less than 2 sq ft.
Comprised only of a robot arm, vision camera, and end effector, the collaborative robot at Nortura takes up less than 2 sq ft.

Oslo-based Nortura SA is a Norwegian agricultural cooperative that operates 33 slaughterhouses and other processing plants for the production of meat and eggs. At its Sogndal, Norway, plant, the company produces 2,200 tons annually of processed meat products, including cured ham, pepperoni, salami, and traditional Norwegian sausages. Until recently, palletizing of case-packed product at the facility was done manually. However, for employees, the work was repetitive and strenuous and provided few challenges.

While Nortura was eager to automate its palletizing operations, it had limited floor space in which to install a traditional palletizing robot, which requires a large, fixed cell with safety caging. The company wanted to be able to palletize continuously without stopping the production line, but needed the flexibility to use the space for other processes if there were no pallets in place.

With a limited budget, Nortura also had the added challenge of trying to find a cost-effective six-axis robot that had the required range and payload capacity to stack boxes of different sizes and weights at different heights on a pallet. The robot also needed to be flexible and easy to program to work with the vision system, and reliable enough to run with minimal supervision.

To meet Nortura’s challenges, robotics integrator Rocketfarm AS engineered a solution comprising a Universal Robots  UR10 collaborative robot equipped with a UniGripper SMS 80-200 vacuum gripper, and a customized vision system for an innovative, small-footprint approach. Rocketfarm mounted the vision camera, an IFM O2D222 from ifm efector, inc., in the ceiling 13 ft above the robot, which is positioned below on a narrow stand.

Explains Lars Bårdgard Åstveit, Developer at Rocketfarm, “Basically, the robot is just mounted a couple of feet from the end of the conveyor. The robots are mounted ad hoc to the production lines, which means you don’t have to do any expensive construction work in order to further automate the palletizing.

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