October 2019

n FOOD AND BEVERAGE Cobot lends a hand to stack ready-meals T he Swiss ready-meals manufacturer Bischofszell Foods, a subsidiary of the Migros Group (Switzerland), specialises in up-market meals that would not be out of place in a haute cuisine setting. Its factory, near St Gallen, works around the clock, producing two million dishes every year to satisfy a growing demand for its products. Steffen Knoll, the company’s technology project manager and automation expert, is keen on the idea of man-robot collaboration (MRC), not just to boost capacity.“MRC offers a completely new range of possibilities,”he says. “It obviously gives us the opportunity to expand our capacity relatively easily, but it also enables us to provide targeted support by means of robotics to the strengths of our employees in terms of flexibility and intelligence, thereby minimising health hazards and the risk of injury to humans arising from stressful activities.” Knoll has applied these principles to an operation that involves taking packaged convenience dishes from the production line and stacking them in multiple layers on metal trays, which are then slotted into trolleys for transportation to a pasteurisation and sterilisation area. This process, when performed manually, poses potential injury risks for human workers. While distributing the ready-meals on the aluminium trays and the placing spacers between the layers is relatively easy, stacking the large metal trays on the trolleys is not a popular activity among Bischofszell’s employees. Manhandling the trays, each measuring 900 x 900mm and weighing 5kg, over an eight-hour shift is hard work. The trays have to be slotted accurately into the trolleys, raising the risk of crushed fingers. “Our employees are very experienced in this work, but risk of injury cannot be ruled out,” Knoll explains.“What could be more appropriate than sharing the handling process between man and machine? Also, in direct collaboration at a single compact workstation, without being separated by a safety barrier, the more agreeable tasks can be assigned to the human employee, and the strenuous operations involving the risk of injury to the robot. It seemed to us that MRC presented an effective solution.” However, implementing the proposed In a pioneering project involving collaboration between robots and human workers, a Swiss food manufacturer set out to achieve two objectives – producing ready-meals efficiently, and humanising the workplace. Bischofszell’s six-axis robot has multiple safety functions that make it suitable for man-robot collaborations.