An Efficient Control Configuration Development for a High-speed Robotic Palletizing System

This article presents a newly developed robotized palletizer control configuration consisting of a graphical application running on a human-machine interface (HMI) touch screens, a PLC program, and a servo system that executes palletizer reconfiguration and makes high-speed robotic palletizing possible. The servo system of the palletizer allows the PLC to reconfigure the palletizer automatically, based on the configuration data, and to control the product feed to the robots that execute the palletizing function. This allows the robots to handle several boxes at a time and therefore achieve high-speed palletizing. Significant downtime reduction during batch changes is achieved due to simplification of operator tasks, which makes the configuration and control method ideally suitable for production environments with frequent batch changes. Packaging and materials handling industries may be financially benefited using this configuration and control method. These include low palletizer downtime, high palletizer throughput, low training costs, no rework due to configuration errors and wider availability of potential operators.