Piab’s Kenos® foam gripper head provides sweet success

Background

When a leading British sugar manufacturer wanted to modernize and relocate a granulated sugar production line, a local robot expert was chosen to provide a robot based end of line palletizing solution. The existing line could only handle one box at a time. The aim was to provide a solution that could handle multiple boxes at once and to rapidly reduce the time taken to complete each pallet. The customer wanted a simple solution, moving away from a complex system of suction cups and mechanical grippers on their existing system.

Solution

After extensive consultation with the customer and Piab, the robot company selected Piab's Kenos® KVGL-800 large area foam gripper head. Integrated vacuum generation with COAX® vacuum technology made this a simple end of arm tooling solution.

Result

The customer is now able to pick a large range of box sizes and weights. The single Kenos® gripper picks multiple boxes to reduce pallet building time. They were also able to pick and place the paper interlayer as well as the boxes with a result of doubling their palletizing efficiency. Kenos® is proving to be a simplified design with quickly replaceable foam for minimum downtime.

”The end customer is very happy with the solution we provided and thus we are in discussions on further projects with this customer”, says a contact from the local robot expert.