FANUC America, a global industrial automation leader, is officially set to showcase its latest packaging and processing innovations at Pack Expo Chicago.
According to certain reports, the showcase in question will feature FANUC’s food-grade cobots stainless industrial robots, and more, with each solution expected to deliver uninterrupted speed, reliability, accuracy and dexterity, as well as maintain food safety across real-world applications.
Beyond that, the whole showcase will likely include easy-to-use food-grade CRX collaborative robots, high-speed and versatile SCARA robot, FANUC DR-3iB/6 STAINLESS Food-Grade Delta robot, and the food-grade/cleanroom type, long-reach LR Mate 200iD/7LC robot.
More on the same would reveal how these solutions are capable of addressing various different industry challenges, including production, supply chain, and labor shortages etc.
Talk about each one on a slightly deeper level, we begin from FANUC’s collaborative robots. Here, the first application is going to be Food-Grade Cobot Bakery Tray Load and Unload with iRVision. In essence, FANUC CRX-20iA/L Food-Grade Cobot will use 3DV/400 iRVision technology mounted to its arm to locate and unload cookies from a tray and place them onto a conveyor, simulating a seamless cookie baking operation.
Once that bit is done, a second CRX-20iA/L will then use a bakery tray to catch the cookies coming off the end of the conveyor before placing the now-full trays onto a cart.
The next use case would be Food-Grade Cobot Palletizing. Boasting a 30 kg payload capacity and 1,756 mm worth of reach, this particular food-grade cobot will bank upon PalletTool 3 software to efficiently palletize two pallets from a single infeed using a multi-case gripper.
Joining that would be the prospect of intuitive cobot programming, a prospect where attendees will be able to use drag-and-drop icon based programming on the FANUC Tablet TP and three-button wrist to easily kit meat and cheese gift boxes with the CRX-10iA cobot. In case that wasn’t enough, the cobot’s ease of programming comes packaged with FANUC’s world-renowned technology, proven reliability, and sensitive contact detection that allows the CRX-10iA to work safely alongside people.
Moving on to industrial robots, they include, for starters, high speed picking application with line tracking tools. To realize that use case, FANUC uses what is its first stainless steel food-grade delta robot for picking and packing primary food products, setting new benchmarks for payload, speed, reach, and sanitation in robotic food handling.
Not just that, it also uses iRVision and iRPickTool line tracking software to pick place randomly oriented fish fillets alongside an SR-12iA/C. The food assembly also stands to benefit from FANUC’s technology. This will be relayed when the company uses its LR Mate 200iD series of tabletop industrial robots to assemble cheeseburgers during its demonstration. Complimenting that would be LR Mate 200iD/7LC, which should come in handy for picking and placing buns, burgers and toppings before removing and reversing order so that the cycle can repeat.
Another thing FANUC will do during the demonstration is bringing out its six-axis M-710iD/50M robot, combined with two iRVision 3DV/1600 vision sensors and the FANUC iPC and iPC’s AI Box Detection software, to locate boxes within stock carts. Once it has located the stated boxes, the robot will depalletize boxes from one cart and utilize PalletTool to palletize them on the opposite cart. Basically, by emptying one cart, the technology will depalletize and palletize back to the original cart and set the stage for repeating this cycle.
Rounding up highlights would be FANUC’s cutting-edge robotic controllers i.e. R-50iA, the world’s* first robot controller to offer cyber security with a wide range of enhancements and new intelligent features purposed around maximizing robot performance. During the demonstration, guests can expect to learn about performance enhancements and optimized efficiency showcased in the context of heavy payload palletizing cell, which integrates the new robot controller.
