This is a case erecting and packing system: a machine forms cardboard cases from flat-packed blanks, and a robot then loads product into those cases once they’re built. It automates two connected jobs that typically eat a lot of labour hours in a packing department.
Case erecting and case packing are usually treated as two separate problems, often with a person standing between the two machines checking that cases actually came out formed correctly before product gets loaded into them. That manual check is exactly the kind of step that either slows the line down or gets skipped under pressure, and a case that hasn’t been formed correctly causes a much bigger mess further down the line than just a wasted carton. The customer needed the two stages working in lockstep, with no silent failures between them, and tooling that wouldn’t lock them into a single case size.
The case erector takes flat blanks, folds and seals the base, and presents a ready-to-fill carton to the robotic packing station. From there, the robot picks product from the infeed, using fixed pick points or vision guidance depending on how consistent the product is, and places it into the case in a defined pattern. Sensors confirm each case has actually been formed correctly before any product is loaded into it, closing the gap that a manual check used to cover. The two stages are mechanically and electrically synchronised, and tooling on both the erector and the robot end-effector is designed for relatively quick changeover between case sizes and product formats.
The line now runs at a steady, unattended rate with consistent case quality and a built-in check that catches malformed cases before they become a packing problem, rather than after. Removing the manual hand-off between erecting and packing also removed the variability that hand-off used to introduce, a pattern that applies to plenty of secondary packaging lines beyond this one.