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Big boost in cartoning through robotics

Leclerc Foods went from 750 to 1,200 energy bars/min in its cartoning operation and gained all kinds of flexibility that helps it meet private-label customer requirements.

The robotic cartoning system is actually three identical machines each consisting of six sub-machines.
The robotic cartoning system is actually three identical machines each consisting of six sub-machines.

Family owned and forward thinking, Leclerc Foods is a fifth-generation Canadian bakery manufacturer based just outside of Quebec City with plants in four U.S. cities as well. In addition to its own iconic brands, the firm has established a sizeable amount of business on the private-label side of things, to the point that Vice President of Co-Manufacturing and Manufacturing Infrastructure Jean-Sebastien Leclerc estimates that only about 20% of the firm’s output is own-brand product.

Over the past few years Leclerc, along with robotic automation supplier Schubert, has been busy optimizing the cartoning of its film-wrapped energy bars. With the installation this past May of its fifth impressive robotic system, this time at its headquarters plant, Leclerc was able to boost its cartoning speeds from 750 to 1,200 bars/min. The length of the Schubert system is 131 ft, and upon seeing it one’s reaction is to think that it’s rather on the large side—until one learns what it has replaced and how much it has opened up, simplified, automated, and accelerated the cartoning process.

Also essential is how much easier it is to go from a six- to a 12- to an 18-count carton. With so much of Leclerc’s production being of the private-label variety, that kind of flexibility and ease of changeover is priceless.

It’s worth pointing out that the cartoning solution that Leclerc replaced was also a robotic one. But it was considerably less streamlined to say the least, involving as it did two carton erectors, two delta style robotic carton pick-and-place carton loaders, and two carton closers. Not to mention all the conveyor connections needed to tie the two erector/loader/closer lines together.

“We like how compact the footprint of the Schubert system is compared to what we had before,” says Jean-Sebastien Leclerc. “Carton erecting, filling, and closing is all self contained in one machine. Floor space is always an issue, but in the first plant where we installed the Schubert solution, our Tennessee plant, we were especially tight for space, so it was an especially big improvement there. Not only that, just one operator is needed on this entire robotic system.”

Flow wrapping is first
The energy bars are made one floor above the packaging operation. They’re brought down to the packaging floor and fed into two existing flow wrappers. Subsequently they make their way to four parallel infeed conveyors that lead them into the Schubert system, which is characterized by several essential design features:

• First, it operates on a counterflow principle. The bars being being cartoned travel north on the main product conveyor, then south on what Schubert calls “transmoduls,” then north again once they’ve been picked from the transmoduls and placed into cartons, and finally south as filled cartons exit in the opposite direction that individual bars entered.

• Second, while all bars travel down the same main product conveyor, there are actually three tightly integrated cartoning machines picking bars from that conveyor. Each of these machines is made up of six sub-machines responsible for picking, placing, and carton closing.

• Third, bars aren’t picked and placed directly into cartons. Instead, they’re picked from the main product conveyor and placed into transmoduls, which are carriages that are milled from an aluminum block. Each transmodul—600 mm long, 200 mm wide, and 120 mm high—runs on a rail. The power supply is inductive, and all data and signals are transmitted wirelessly, so each transmodul can move freely on its rail. In each of the three cartoning systems there are seven transmodul carriages, and it’s these carriages that deliver wrapped bars in the desired count to a sub-machine that picks the whole group from the carriage and places it in an erected carton. Among the benefits of this approach is that while individual bars move along the main product conveyor in continuous motion, when it comes time to pick a group of bars for placement into a carton, the transmodul from which the bars are picked is stationary.

• The proprietary vision system on the Schubert equipment inspects every bar on the main product conveyor to learn its position so that it can tell the robotic pick heads where they need to go to pick individual bars. The vision system also inspects for quality control, so if bars are stuck together or a bar’s wrapper is open, that bar will not be picked by a robot.

Counterflow in action
Because the TLM cartoning system is based on a counterflow principle, the place where individual energy bars enter is the exact same place where finished cartons are discharged—in the opposite direction, of course. Speaking of infeed, the infeed portions just ahead of the Schubert conveyors consist of four parallel conveyors engineered by ABF Systems Inc. ABF also handled the integration of the checkweighing and printing stations and the overhead conveyor system that takes cartons to a remote case packer. Many of the conveyor connections are made by Dorner, a conveyor OEM with whom ABF has a longstanding partnership.

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