LRC-700 - Batteries

Please click on the PDF icon for the case study

The Project

Panasonic Primary Battery Corp. of America approached us with a challenge to tray pack 4 different styles of batteries into 14 different pack patterns... on one machine. In addition, the system also had to palletize the sealed cases. For this project robotic packaging was the best option.

Project Manager Rob Tamblyn says, "The key challenge here was to orient and position the blister packs properly. The packs have a non-uniform weight distribution that when not taken in to consideration would lead to improperly placed product."

Quick to rise to the occasion, Langen worked with the customer to develop a single innovative puck and plastic insert that accommodates any of the 14 different configurations and that also used the weight distribution to our advantage.

After the battery packs are collated and assembled into the puck a four-axes robot packs any one of the 3 different varieties of trays. The trays are transferred onto a conveyor, check weighed and case packed before returning to the robot, which using its dual-head tooling, palletizes the cases. Here also the weight of the loaded pallets had to be considered and a heavy-duty pallet conveyor was used. In the end, the complexity of the proposed project was significantly reduced by the simplicity and ease of use of the pucks, plastic inserts and the dual function robot.


Installation Elements

• FANUC M420i robot using FANUC controls for robotic operations.



• Langen custom designed end of arm tool.



• Langen integration of servo drives, conveyor drives, FANUC controls and AB controls.



• Palletizing module.

Product

• Batteries in a blister pack.

• Five styles of AAA battery blister packs in various pack patterns.



• Six styles of AA battery blister packs in various pack patterns.



• Two blister pack patterns of 9V batteries.



• One blister pack pattern of each of C and D batteries.

Method of Operation

• Two streams of blister packs of batteries are fed into the system at a rate of up to 120 products per minute. Product are metered to create an equal pitch between the products.



• A vision system verifies the polarity orientation and identifies missing product.



• Custom designed plastic tray inserts are held in a standard sized puck and fed in two streams to the product infeed. There are seven inserts based on the product being loaded.



• The plastic tray inserts are indexed to position where they are loaded by a controlled vertical feed of product.



• The loaded puck travels on a conveyor to the robotic tray loading station.



• Display trays are formed in an upstream tray erector and each display tray will receive one, two or four loaded plastic tray inserts.



• When the tray reaches the robotic loading station, a funnel is inserted to ensure that the plastic tray inserts are loaded into the display trays without any interference.



• Four pucks are unloaded simultaneously into pre-positioned trays.



• The loaded display trays travel along a product discharge belt and are verified by a check-weigher, manually case packed and then auto-palletized.