Speed up your Palletizing
How can you speed up your Palletizing?
Choosing Multi-pick and the right case orientation can have a big impact on the speed of your palletizing. To achieve the best performance of your palletizer, one of the most important settings to look at is simply what orientation the case/SKU comes down the conveyor.
Possibilities within your pattern with multipick
If the robot is singlepicking a case, the amount of cases the robot can pick per minute is limited to the amount of cycles the robot performs per minute. But when multipicking cases, the amount of cases palletized per minute depends on how many cases the robot can both pick and place per robot cycle.
What could happen if you rotate the cases at the conveyor?
While the amount of cases the robot can pick from the conveyor mostly depends on the size of your gripper, the amount of cases the robot can place per minute depends on the palletizing pattern. So to achieve the fastest possible palletizing, you can either make a pallet pattern that fits with how the cases are being picked, or you can adjust how the cases are being picked to fit with your pallet pattern.
While maintaining the pallet pattern often is a requirement from a customer, rotating the case at the end of the conveyor is usually something that is “no problem”.
Example 1
Below you see a pallet with cases that are 800mm long and 200mm wide.
Picture 1: Robot pick 1 case per robot cycle.
Picture 2: Robot pick 6 cases per robot cycle.
Now imagine how these cases buffer up on the conveyor before the robot picks them. Depending on orientation, the gripper on the robot could in this extreme example either pick the entire layer of 6 cases in one robot cycle if the gripper was long enough, or if the case was oriented the wrong direction on the conveyor, the gripper could only pick 1 case per robot cycle.
So in this example, the orientation of the case on the conveyor represents a major speed difference. If the requirement is 18 cases per minute for this example, and the robot can do 6 cycles per minute, the orientation of the case on the conveyor is a make or break for the project and a gripper that could pick 3 cases at a time would be sufficient.
Example 2
In the example above, that might have been an obvious example, but the same goes for many other palletizing patterns as well. Let's have a look at this pallet pattern below:
Picture 3: Total of 12 robot cycles per layer
Picture 4: Total of 8 robot cycles per layer
For this example, let's limit our gripper to only being able to pick 2 cases per pick, and once again imagine how the cases buffer up on the conveyor. In this example, rotating the box 90 degrees on the conveyor will have a huge impact.
If oriented optimally, the robot will be able to pick 2 boxes for each robot cycle, so one layer could be completed in 8 robot cycles.
Oriented the other direction on the conveyor, the robot would only be able to double pick 4 times and be forced to single pick 8 times to complete the layer. A total of 12 robot cycles per layer, thus palletizing significantly slower than the optimized alternative.
Running this short analysis for a project could be worthwhile if speed is important to the project. It could also be important when designing or choosing a gripper for a project.