Flexible Product Cartoner

Brooks-Flexible-Cartoner2
About This Project

The sleeve transfer machine takes a puck provided by the customer and transports it trough a robotic pick and place system for packaging. The process has product verification through a color sensor, puck verification sensor, and reject cylinder. Then separated from single row columns to two separate rows with a shift gate to move four pucks at a time into separate rows. After the pucks are separated out evenly, they create an array that is then held in position by stop gate cylinders. The lanes have back up sensors to keep from damaging upstream equipment such as the shift gate. There are three gates to control the different arrays. There is a stop gate for back pressure then a gate on each row for four pucks two per side. This is for one of the packages that require four finished product per carton. The third gate is for the packaging of six finished products per carton. Product selection is set easily by recipe on the HMI (Human Machine Interface). Then sensors on an IO Link system verify product in position for the robot to pick product from the puck. On release of the pucks from lane B there is a cylinder for hold back to allow for lane A to feed out first then verification that ether two or three pucks have passed. Then gate for lane B will release and verify ether two or three pucks have passed and reset.  This is for the pucks to go back into single file for reentry into the downstream system.

In the cylinder gate station, there is a Fanuc Scara SR Series Robot (6-iA) to picking product from the puck. The robot has a Schunk gripper cylinder attached that has been engineered to, while open, line up to the center point of the puck and closes bring all four or six products in to a tight centered pattern to fit into the carton. Then the product is placed into the carton at a rate of four at under 2.4 seconds, and six at under 3.59 seconds per cycle.