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Robots in action can be found everywhere. Robot Manufacturers give examples of robot applications in different industries.
Adept, USA - IFR-Partner
Clean Solution for Chocolate Factory
Company
A large Korean based chocolate company specializes in making variety of chocolates in large volume. The company thrives to deliver high quality chocolates packed into a specialized box in variety of shapes and forms.
Han Shin Power Tech Co., one of the largest system integrators in Korea, was retained to help the chocolate company to comply with HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) food safety regulation from KFDA (Korea Food & Drug Administration). Han Shin has presence in Korea, China, Vietnam, Australia, US and Canada catering to Asian and North American market.
Problem
Han Shin's customer specializes in manufacturing variety of chocolates. They had manual workforce picking chocolates traveling on a high-speed conveyor. The large conveyor had workforce standing along the belt to pick and place the chocolates into the box.
Employees were stressed working with high-speed conveyors. A simple task of picking chocolates had a 2% error rate. In addition, the chocolates had higher probability of getting rotten with human contact, and quality of packaging was compromised during end of the shifts. The positive side of the manual workforce was the ability to handle variety of chocolates without additional effort.
Solution
Adept consulted with Han Shin, and designed the hygienic primary packaging solution jointly through USDA-accepted robots. Han Shin built a compact system and simplified the design of the robotic system based on the customer?s requirement. Han Shin developed multiple recipes to handle product variations with only few clicks on the operator interface. The system was designed, tested, and optimized only in few weeks, and customer was running fully automated system from a manual-process in 3 months.
Adept & Han Shin solution consists of:
- Adept Quattro s650HS, an USDA-accepted robot
- Single user-friendly interface to manage the entire line of robots, cameras, controllers, and tooling through Adept ACE software platform
- Vision guidance and inspection system through ACE AdeptSight software
- Packaging application with conveyor-tracking capabilities for through ACE PackXpert software
- High payload capability up to 6kg allowing the robot to pick 80ppm
- Han Shin designed & built the custom end-effector for high speed picking
- Han Shin designed a compact and simple system to a third of existing solution size
Impact
Han Shin's customer moved from a conventional semi-hard automation with manual workforce to a completely automated robotic solution in 3 months, replacing the manual workforce from a mundane stressful job. The customer improved the footprint efficiency by 300% achieving the targeted throughput of 80ppm with ease. Han Shin also deployed the system through a user-friendly interface so that the customers could pick any recipe in a few clicks. Most importantly they are now certified by KFDA as HACCP compliant, and have a clean hygienic plant.
March 2012
