In this application engineered by Remtec Corporation, a FANUC 4-axis M-3iA Robot picks randomized pouches of candy and placing them into buckets on a continuous cartoner infeed conveyor. The design rate for the application is 90 pouches/minute.
The system is designed to operate in three modes:
• Picks semi-random pouches straight from the pouching operation.
• Picks pouches from a hopper-fed buffer conveyor with a pouch flattener.
• Combined mode -- either direct or hopper-fed.
The application uses Fanuc Robotics' iRVision with visual line tracking to locate the pouches to be picked. In addition, the cartoner conveyor is being tracked by a separate encoder and fed to the robot controller, making this a dual-tracking application. iRvision is also used to reject crushed and overlapping pouches, which are simply recirculated to the hopper and later flattened and reintroduced via a buffer conveyor. The black belt on the pick conveyor allows iRVision to be configured so that white, silver metallic, and even clear pouches can be picked with one Vision Process.
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