This is a pick and pack robot: it takes ice blocks straight off the production line and packs them into cartons ready for despatch, replacing a manual packing step that’s normally done in a freezer-adjacent, cold and wet environment. It’s a good example of a “simple looking” task that’s actually difficult to automate well, because the product itself is inconsistent in shape, slippery, and easily damaged.
Ice blocks don’t behave like a typical rigid, dry product. Condensation makes surfaces slippery, the blocks vary slightly in shape and size from one to the next, and the packing area itself runs cold and damp, conditions that are hard on both people and standard industrial equipment. The customer needed a system that could keep pace with an existing bagging or freezing line without becoming the bottleneck, while also handling product gently enough that pack presentation didn’t suffer. Reliability mattered as much as speed: a cell that stops every time it mishandles a slippery block isn’t actually solving the labour problem it was built to solve.
We selected an end-effector and sensing combination specifically suited to cold, wet handling, one that grips the block securely without the crushing force that would damage it or the slippage that would drop it. All hardware exposed to the environment is rated for cold and condensation, and the frame and guarding use corrosion-resistant materials to cope with regular wash-down cycles, which is standard for any cell working this close to a freezer. The robot’s pick and pack cycle is synchronised to the upstream process via standard industrial signalling, so the cell speeds up or slows down with the line rather than running on a fixed, disconnected cycle time.
The customer removed staff from a repetitive, physically uncomfortable task that carries real fatigue and injury risk over a shift, while keeping pack quality and rate consistent regardless of who’s running the line. Because the cell uses standard safety and communication protocols, it slots into the existing packing line without requiring a redesign of the equipment around it, and the same approach can be redeployed if the packing format changes down the track.