When Guida's Milk & Ice Cream out of New Britain, Conn., decided to automate palletizing for two lines, they chose a robotic system with a robot that runs 12 to 16 hours per day, six days per week. On one side, it picks up corrugated cases containing eight half-gallon or four-gallon jugs and stacks them on a pallet. The system picks up gallon cases four at a time and places them in a row on the pallet.

Each layer has three rows, and pallets stack four layers high for a total of 48 cases. This is just one example of how robotic palletizing is quickly growing in popularity among packaging lines.

Equipment builders are delivering more turnkey systems, creating more modular designs, replacing pneumatics with electromechanical devices, and automating inspection tasks in an effort to accelerate changeover, increase speed, boost efficiency, simplify integration, lower costs, and meet expectations for consistent product quality.

With the ability to handle everything from caps to pouches to torque converters, robots can meet the needs of multinational and smaller packagers and are seeing increasing use among companies with 100-200 employees. Due to their smaller footprint and superior precision over conventional palletizing technology, robots can offer major advantages for smaller packagers with low-speed packaging lines.

These systems can handle Guida's fourlayer, half-gallon case stacks five at time and arrange them in four rows per layer for a total of 60 cases per pallet. On the other side of the work cell, 12-count trays of 10- or 16-ounce bottles arrive on a second line. The robots pick them up four at a time and arrange them in layers of 20 cases. The 10-ounce bottles are stacked nine layers high; the 16-ounce bottles go six high. Since the trays of the smaller containers arrive more frequently, programmers can set the robot to alternate between the two lines and build two pallets at a time.

The robot can insert slip sheets between layers to enhance the stability of the final load and can also build partial pallets for specific orders. A pallet handling conveyor completes the system, delivering empty pallets to the robot and transferring full loads to an adjacent stretch wrapping cell. Installation of the robot cell made it possible for the dairy to reassign two workers to less physically demanding work.