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Cask Robot Palletiser
The purpose of the Robot is to fully automate the handling of full casks onto either locator boards or pallets. The Robot is capable of handling both 9 and 18 gallon casks at a maximum rate of 264 casks (9 gallon) and 180 casks (18 gallon) per hour.
The casks are positioned one at a time at the end of the infeed conveyor. Once in position the spherical robot's gripper tool will pick up the cask by the bottom section and then move to place the cask either on the discharge conveyor or on to a previously automatically placed pallet. This process will then repeat until the layer is completed, then the robot will open up the gripper tool to allow it to pick up either a locator board or pallet as required and place it onto the layer of casks. This will repeat until the stack is finished, the stack will then be discharged to allow the fork truck to take it to the warehouse.
Although spherical robots are common place in industry they normally handle uniformly sized objects. This makes our robot fairly unique as the gripper tool has had to be designed to cope with the wide variation in size of the cask, locator boards and pallet populations allowing us to continue to use them.