For consumers, convenience products are in the truest sense of the word “convenient”, because what matters most to them is that the products can be easily prepared — and taste good of course. A robot would view this differently — for one thing, it’s not interested in the taste. However, it is very interested in the external composition of the product. Ready-meals or frozen products with a portion of fish, pasta and vegetables, which are supplied in microwaveable packaging to the retail trade would present a robot with formidable challenges.

 

“The food industry is still a new market for robots, and its by no means an easy one. This is because many products, whether sausages, fish fillets, cheese slices or chocolate bars vary in quality and size”, explains Rolf Peters, Managing Director of K-Robotix in Bremen. In addition to this are the extremely high hygiene standards specified by the food producers, which the robots also have to comply with. Peters, together with a network of project partners from the technology sector, has created a complete series of robots for industrial and logistical use. An example is the Robotik-Pack-Line, which will be presented at Anuga FoodTec from 10th to 13th March 2009 in Cologne. For Peters, who can be counted as one of the pioneers of robotics in Germany, the benefits of robots are obvious. They are “flexible and their work is precise,” he says. “Robots can take over the monotonous and physically straining work that people would usually have to do.” And with robots it doesn’t matter how long the work shift is or in which sector they are used.

 

The archetype of the industrial robot celebrated its premiere back in the early 1950s. At that time, U.S. scientists George Devol and Joe Engelberger developed the robot Unimate and took out a patent in December 1954 for its design. Unimate was the first industrially used robot. It weighed 2 tons and was controlled by means of a programme that was saved on a magnetic drum. First used in the production of cathode ray tubes, it served to sequence and stack die-cast metals. In 1961 the first Unimate robot was installed at General Motors. The breakthrough for robots came when General Motors ordered 66 of the robots for its car assembly lines. From then on the automotive industry led the way in the use of industrial robots.

 

According to estimates from the Statistical Department of the International Federation of Robotics, there are currently around one million industrial robots being used worldwide. Of these robots, nearly 50 per cent are being used in Asia, one third in Europe and “only” around 16 per cent in their land of origin — the United States. Germany, the largest market for industrial robots in Europe, is regarded as the engine of growth for the market. The deliveries of industrial robots in Germany last rose by 30 percent to 14,900 robots – reaching the highest number that has ever been registered in Germany.

 

The source of this sudden increase is the demand for robots in every area of industry. With their six axes, today’s robots can carry loads of up to 500 kg in any area where a high degree of automation is required. This includes production of food. Robots can load and unload packaging machines, cut pork sides and stack and palletise any kinds of goods. Among these robots one can find true palletising experts, freezing experts and such models as the stainless steel KR 15 SL robots from the Augsburg-based Kuka company. Thanks to their hygienic and easy to clean design, these robots can be used in the processing of meat, fish, cheese or milk. The palletising robot KR 180-2 PA Arctic can happily work in freezing temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius. This robot was especially developed to do work in frosty conditions. Without the need for a protective cover and an energy supply system that is equipped for freezing technology, this robot is the expert for frozen products.

 

However, the food industry doesn’t only involve lifting and moving heavy loads. For example, individual pralines and chocolate bars have to be positioned exactly where they belong in the packaging so that they don’t slip and cause the machinery to fail. This is a task that truly needs a “sensitive touch”. Here it is essential to be able to recognise the exact positions of up to 300 pralines per minute on a conveyor belt and for a robot to take them off the belt and place them as delicately as possible into trays. A robot can only become a real replacement for manual labour when it can combine fast image capturing with a sophisticated gripping mechanism. A camera records the pivot point, outlines and balance point of the pralines. Through the computer controlled analysis of this information, the gripper can be moved into the correct position where it unerringly “picks up” the individual pralines and places them into the packaging. This is why they are also referred to as “pick and place” robots, which are different from traditional industrial robots by virtue of their mechanism.

 

In general, the size and form of a robot’s gripper depends on what exactly it will have to grasp. There are grippers for stacking, sucking and form or force-fit gripping — and some that use one or several grip points. Some grippers work purely mechanically, while others use vacuum technology and suction the food gently to them. The development of different grippers for specific foods is a key factor in the latest success in robot technology. As the food industry continues to develop products in all imaginable shapes and sizes, the development of grippers reaches new levels and becomes increasingly complex.

 

Rolf Peters from K-Robotix: “The food industry is being forced to expedite the automation of its plants. Robots increase the safety of processes and decrease the chances of downtimes or production shortfall thanks to their reliability and availability.” Without intelligent automation solutions it would be impossible to keep production and products in the food industry at a continuously high level. Says Peters: “Robots hold a place in the future — a future which has only just begun in the food industry.”