September 2021

Robot palletiser raises productivity by 53% at KitKat plant in Brazil N estlé, the world's largest food and beverage company, operates a chocolate manufacturing plant in Brazil that supplies confectionery to South and Central America and Canada. The Caçapava site is the company’s largest KitKat factory in the Americas. Nestlé wanted to reduce the area occupied by robotic palletising operations at the plant. An important requirement was for the palletising robot to interact safely with employees, who occasionally need to enter the area to speed up pallet changes. The confectionery giant’s engineering team worked with ABB Robotics to develop a compact, collaborative palletising cell that uses an IRB 660 robot with a suction gripper head to move boxes from the end of the production line to pallets, stacking them accurately to ensure a balanced load. ABB’s SafeMove robot monitoring software allows safe, intermittent collaboration between the robot and the production line workers. The software detects movements near the robot and, if someone approaches, it restricts a robot’s speed, motion and position. This allows the large robots to work safely alongside people, without needing conventional fences, safety switches, doors or locks. Using the software instead of fences at the Caçapava factory has resulted in a cell footprint that is about 30–40% smaller than previous cells at the site. At the same time, the productivity of the pallet-loading process has been improved by 53%, and the need for maintenance has been reduced. To demonstrate how the cell would operate before it was installed, ABB used its RobotStudio software to simulate the installation in a virtual environment, including showing cycle times for the operations. This reduced the implementation time and avoided failures that might otherwise have occurred during the start- up process. The installation has been so successful that Nestlé has replicated it at three other factories in Brazil, with 13 palletising cells already in operation. Further installations are planned. n Nestle has boosted productivity and saved space at a plant in Brazil by installing a robotic palletiser coupled with safety monitoring software that does away with protective fences. Nestlé’s palletising robot cell uses cobot technology enhance employee safety, while increasing efficiency, at its Brazilian plant 39 www.drivesncontrols.com September 2021 Meet your new colleague Discover the flexible robotics solution Prepare for the future and boost production with OMRON TM cobots. Take a leap towards a manufacturing environment where humans and machines work side by side in harmony. Collaborative robots are ideal for a VUPNBUJOH QBMMFUJTJOH MPBEJOH BOE VOMPBEJOHG reeing their human colleagues from repetitive and potentially dangerous tasks. Would you like to knowmore? +44 (0)1908 258258 oeeuk_sales@omron.com industrial.omron.co.uk/cobots Contact us to see how you can deploy cobots quickly in stand-alone applications, or integrated into a total automation concept from OMRON. Contact us for Proof of Concept testing!