As he points out, the cashing and palletising at the end of the line are operations that must now be automated. The difficulty is such that it becomes almost impossible to stabilize a person on these positions. I have already met companies that were forced to slow down their production rates due to lack of staff at the end of the line. With consequences of orders not being taken or penalties for delayed delivery.”

When the loss of earnings is significant or recruitment impossible, robotization is naturally necessary. But in other cases, the investment decision is at odds with profitability. The purchase of a robot can be compared to the purchase of bandwidth: it is a capacity, here of work, sold at a fixed price. This capacity must be reduced to the number of hours of operation of the robot, but also to the number of operations carried out by the robot in its range of use: the less the robot does operations per hour, the more the cost brought back to the carton or pallet increases. , says Brian Boulanger.

The solution is to assign several tasks to the robot, to increase the number of cycles performed. “The idea is really to use the robot to its full potential, and there are several ways of doing that,” he adds. One robot can easily take cartons, position spacers and pick up pallets on the same station. Or carry out consecutive packing and palletizing. Or take and position several products/objects on each cycle. If we exploit the versatility of the robot from the design of the line, we can even go further: I have an example of a robot installed in a plant, which, with two heads and a tool change system, is able to cash trays in cardboard or flat boards depending on the market. Without this versatility, there might have been two cash-in stations.”

Compared to the traditional cartesian robot, limited in movement, it is the polyarticulated robot that is essential in multi-task cells. The performance of these depends, for its part, in large part on the know-how of the integrator, on its ability to develop tailor-made solutions, particularly in grippers. Brian Boulanger said, “the role of the integrator is also to minimize the clutter in the cells; all factories are out of space. We can also support our clients in their environmental responsibility. We designed a cell to form recovery boxes for a customer who wanted to work in a circular mode.”

The robots at the end of the line have not finished surprising us