FreeMove in a Collaborative Palletizing Case Study—Part 1
By Alberto Moel, Vice President Strategy and Partnerships, Veo Robotics
Welcome back, dear reader, to one more installment of our blog on human-machine collaboration and the future of automation. I hope you are enjoying it so far.
In our first case study on the values of flexibility and automation, we focused on how the Veo FreeMoveTM system would allow for substantially improved economics in a dual fixture assembly use case. This time around we are going to discuss how effective human-robot collaboration can unlock value in another micro and practical use case: palletizing.
In collaboration with Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM)1 and a major maker of consumer-packaged goods, we’ve developed detailed models of four palletizing alternatives: a fully manual approach, a fully automated approach, a PFL robot-based palletizer, and the Veo FreeMoveTM solution. If you are a member of ARM, you can find more content about this case study at the ARM Exchange (including a webinar). And if you’re not a member, it’s a good time to sign up!
In this first part of our palletizing case study, we will outline the circumstances and conditions of the case and discuss how the Veo FreeMoveTM solution requires much lower capital expenditures and results in shorter payback while providing the best operating metrics. In Part 2, we will closely examine how the four solutions stack up against each other economically, and provide further evidence that FreeMove’s collaborative and flexible approach leads to dramatic efficiency gains and cost savings, especially with regards to fault recovery and reconfiguration.
Figure 1. Human palletizer approach with boxes, conveyors, and pallets.
The Setup: Unmet Needs in Palletizing
A large manufacturer of consumer-packaged goods—specifically liquid detergents and other products— had been palletizing by hand for many years. This practice was both costly and unsustainable. The company struggled to attract and retain qualified workers for the job of continuously transferring 40 lb. boxes from a conveyor to pallets—a monotonous, labor-intensive task that posed a risk of repetitive stress injuries (Figure 1).
Figure 2. A fully automated palletizing application. (Source: ABB)
Although the company had successfully deployed industrial robots elsewhere in production and was familiar with the value of automation, they were concerned that their facility would not have enough space for a fully automated palletizing workcell, which would require extensive safety guarding (Figure 2).
The company also questioned whether the economics would be much better than manual palletizing, and whether the high capital expenditures of implementing full automation would be worth the investment. For example, faults in the palletizing process (from, say, dropped or misaligned boxes), would require a complete shutdown of the automated workcell (and the production line behind it) to allow a human to enter the workcell to repair the fault. The downtime, which could take up to 15 minutes, would be extremely expensive for the company.
To avoid some of the space and cost constraints of full automation, the company had developed and installed a collaborative Power and Force Limited (PFL) robot-based palletizing solution. But the PFL robots required modifications to make them truly safe for human-robot collaboration—because of the positioning and geometry of the palletizer and the nature of the robots’ end-of-arm tooling, the company spent months designing the process and implementing incremental fixturing to account for pinch points and other issues with human-robot impact.
Although the PFL robot-based palletizer had much shorter fault recovery and lower capital expenditures than the fully automated solution, the PFL robots could only move small payloads at slow speeds with longer cycle times. This meant that the extensive time and capital investments the company had made in the PFL implementation would not be amortized any time soon. To match the throughput of an automated traditional industrial robot, the company would have to deploy multiple PFL robots, which would take up a great deal of floor space.
Given the robots’ limitations and space requirements, in the end, the company wasn’t convinced that the PFL implementation provided any economic benefits over a fully automated palletizing solution using traditional robots or the manual approach prevalent in its factories.
The company then decided to try the Veo FreeMove TM system, which consists of proprietary safety-rateable 3D sensor devices, a computing platform, and associated algorithms and software that can be used with commercially-available standard industrial robots. Veo’s solution enables safe and fluid human-machine interaction so that manufacturers can build flexible and efficient workcells that make the best use of human workers and traditional high-payload, high-throughput industrial machines.
Figure 3. The Veo FreeMove palletizing solution.
In a test installation, Veo worked with the company to integrate the FreeMoveTM system with a standard large-payload ABB Model IRB460 palletizing robot arm, allowing the company to retrofit their existing floor plan with an automated solution without the need for space-consuming and costly safety infrastructure (Figure 3).
Like the fully automated and PFL robot alternatives, the Veo solution uses robots to automatically pick and place packages onto pallets repeatedly over extended periods of time, something robots are very good at doing. However, unlike the fully automated alternative, the Veo solution allows humans to work safely in proximity with the robot, so they can conduct supporting activities or tasks that require dexterity such as placing pallet bumpers and clearing faults in pick and place automation. And unlike the PFL robot alternative, the Veo solution allows industrial robots to operate at full speed with full payloads, and to automatically cease and then resume activity when process faults are detected and corrected.
Modelling the Capital Expenditures of Each Palletizing Approach
In collaboration with ARM and the manufacturer, we developed detailed models of the four palletizing alternatives. We started by looking at the capital expenditure and non-recurring engineering expense estimates for each of the company’s four options.
The manual solution is clearly the cheapest, but because of other costs—i.e., worker health and safety concerns and extremely low throughput compared to automated solutions—it is hardly worth considering. The solutions requiring some form of automation have much higher capital expenditures and non-recurring engineering expenses due to the need for design, development, and deployment of machinery. The PFL solution, in particular, requires material robot capital investment as multiple PFL robots are needed in order to match the payload capacity of the traditional palletizing robots.
Though both the Veo solution and the fully-automated solution use traditional high-speed palletizing robots, the Veo solution is 40% less expensive to install. How is that possible?
- In the Veo approach (as in the manual and PFL robot solutions) the bumper install is done by hand, eliminating expensive fixturing;
- The Veo system is integrated with the traditional palletizing robot and does not require the collection and assembly of multiple scanners or safety sensors from multiple vendors—this means reduced safety infrastructure costs; and
- The Veo approach also avoids many safety guarding design, installation, and programming costs, meaning lower non-recurring engineering expenses.
Though it requires a dramatically lower capital investment, commissioning and operating statistics show that the Veo FreeMoveTM solution retains the short process cycle time of the fully automated solution, has a much shorter payback time (1.4 years versus 2.5 years), and quicker design, development, and implementation times. Which is to say that the Veo solution provides all the benefits of the fully automated solution and more, without the large capital investment.
It is evident that the Veo FreeMoveTM approach is superior to the alternatives, considering the costs and time to implement automated palletizing solutions. But you’ll see in Part 2 that there are also great benefits on an operating basis, as the Veo FreeMoveTM system provides savings on palletizing operating costs and gains from shorter fault recovery relative to the fully automated solution.
Our analysis will also highlight a couple other potential benefits: robotic systems, such as FreeMoveTM, offer an opportunity to enhance overall plant throughput and capacity by eliminating a potential bottleneck at the palletizing step. And the flexibility of Veo’s hybrid system would allow for more cost-effective process re-configuration, should the profile (size, weight, amount) of the items to be palletized change. As we’ve seen in previous blog posts, there is value in flexibility, and the value of quick reconfiguration in palletizing is no different. In the next blog post we’ll quantify and dive deeper into this possibility, so stay tuned!