Packaging Without Pre-Sorting Is Not an Easy Job for a Cobot to Do

Com­pan­ies don’t al­ways pack­age their own products them­selves. In many cases, they out­source this step to con­tract pack­ers. Out­sourcing gives com­pan­ies ac­cess to an ex­tens­ive port­fo­lio of cut­ting-edge ma­chines – thereby sav­ing time and money. The ‘Mul­tiPac Ver­pack­ung + Mont­age GmbH’ co-pack­er, based in Ell­wan­gen in the Ger­man state of Baden-Württemberg, is spe­cial­ised in pack­aging ser­vices for sev­er­al lead­ing con­sumer goods brands. They pack­age a wide range of products in me­di­um and large quant­it­ies in­to fold­ing boxes, blister packs, trays, shrink film and car­tons, among many oth­er types of pack­aging. 

The com­pany’s own ma­chine fleet is there­fore quite ex­tens­ive, and since the sum­mer of 2024, it has also in­cluded two tog.519 co­bots from Schubert. Due to an in­creas­ing vari­ety of products and vari­ants, as well as rising la­bour and site costs, the com­pany needed an ef­fi­cient and flex­ible solu­tion for pack­aging pro­cesses that had pre­vi­ously been done manu­ally. The spe­cif­ic chal­lenge was to pick up a wide vari­ety of un­sor­ted products such as tubes, glue sticks and air freshen­er clips from the con­vey­or belt – us­ing a pick & place sys­tem – and place them in­to pre­pared trays.

Auto­ma­tion solu­tion achieves up to 60 picks per minute

Mul­tiPac needed a high-per­form­ance, state-of-the-art auto­ma­tion solu­tion that could achieve up to 60 picks per minute. Achraf Ben Salem, Head of Co­bot De­vel­op­ment at Schubert, re­ports: “When the de­cision-makers at Mul­tiPac thought of us, they ini­tially had our ul­tra-ef­fi­cient TLM ma­chines in mind – and ruled us out at first. In this case, our top-load­ing sys­tems could not be con­nec­ted to an ex­ist­ing pack­aging line. Also, this solu­tion would have re­quired more space than was avail­able at Mul­tiPac. For­tu­nately, our tog.519 co­bot proved to be a very con­vin­cing al­tern­at­ive.”

Ac­cur­ate, fast pick­ing of un­sor­ted products

Schubert’s tog.519 co­bot can pick up to 70 products one by one from a dis­ordered pile and place them ac­cur­ately in­to the des­ig­nated loc­a­tion. Its suc­cess is en­sured by the AI-sup­por­ted im­age pro­cessing de­veloped by Schubert which re­cog­nises the products it picks up and the en­vir­on­ment in which they are to be placed. As a res­ult, Mul­tiPac can dis­pense with the la­bor­i­ous task of sep­ar­at­ing tubes, pens or fra­grance clips, for ex­ample. 

The tog.519 co­bot has an­oth­er unique fea­ture as well: as soon as it has picked up a product, it con­tin­ues to col­lect in­form­a­tion about its con­di­tion, checks it and ad­justs its work steps ac­cord­ingly. For ex­ample, when pla­cing an item in­to a tray, the co­bot has to make sure that the product open­ing points in a cer­tain dir­ec­tion. This in­volves the co­bot hold­ing the items briefly in front of a cam­era, which re­cog­nises the open­ing. De­pend­ing on where the open­ing is loc­ated, the co­bot either places the product as it is or first turns it. 

The co­bot also ex­cels when it comes to format changes. A simple manu­al ad­just­ment is all it takes to change the pick & place tool. Ben Salem ex­plains: “In a pro­duc­tion space of only six square metres, we have provided Mul­tiPac with a com­pact, high-per­form­ance co­bot that en­ables ef­fi­cient, flex­ible and re­li­able pro­duc­tion. This ex­ample shows that we not only sup­port big-name man­u­fac­tur­ers, but also smal­ler com­pan­ies with a high num­ber of vari­ants – with in­nov­at­ive sys­tems that meet their spe­cif­ic needs."

Facts & fig­ures

The tog.519 cobot:

• Up to 70 picks per minute from a dis­or­gan­ised pile,
• AI-sup­por­ted im­age pro­cessing,
• Flex­ibly pro­cesses food, con­fec­tion­ery or tech­nic­al art­icles.