I, foodbot: declining costs, faster speeds and advances in vision-guided systems are helping food and dairy plants justify the cost of robotics

Dairy Foods, Jan, 2005 by Kevin T. Higgins

Unlike the mechanical pan-stacking, storage and retrieval systems used for years in commercial bakeries, the Bloomfield installation relies on articulated arms to gently handle an inventory of 26,000 pans. Nine workers were replaced and one-third the floor space was required compared to a retired plant. A smaller version of the system was installed three years ago at a Mrs. Baird's Bakery in Texas by Emtrol Inc., a now-defunct material-handling firm. As physically imposing as the robots are, the software and controls architecture that manages the system is the greatest advancement.

"The fewer decisions the robots had to make, the more reliable the system would be," explains Jeremy Kopicz, a former Emtrol engineer who helped execute the integration project with Lancaster, Pa.-based Genesys Controls Corp. The ABB robots came with their own controls and proprietary code. They also had DeviceNet cards, and that facilitated integration of the units with PLCs that also manage a dozen varieties of pans and operator inputs. "DeviceNet was critical for doing real-time control and physically controlling the robots, not just feeding them a profile," says Kopicz.

Big cheese to moldy fries

One of the most dramatic robotic installations in dairy is the AS/RS (automated storage and retrieval system) at Tillamook County Creamery Assoc., Tillamook, Ore. Designed by Westfalia Technologies Inc., York, Pa., Tillamook's 12-level cold storage facility has 15,000 pallet positions and is capable of holding 35 million lbs of cheese.

At Wawa Dairy in Wawa, Pa., a sophisticated AS/RS system allows the dairy to serve as a distribution center for the parent companies chain of convenient stores. The fully automated system mixes a variety of products into mixed pallet orders for individual stores on a daily basis.

One of the most recent AS/RS installations is at HP Hood's expanded Winchester, Va. facility. The 10-level cold storage facility designed by HK Systems, utilizes automated VNA cranes.

Other dairy plants that use some level of storage automation or robotic palletizing include Ben & Jerry's facility in St. Albans, Vt., the cottage cheese line at Sinton Dairy, Colorado Springs, and The Country Fresh novelty plant in Toledo, Ohio, owned by Dean Foods.

To hold down costs, articulated arm robots typically are not equipped with sensor technology. The arms travel a preprogrammed path regardless of any obstructions, human or otherwise. OSHA began assessing fines two years ago for plants that failed to comply with the safety-circuit design guidelines and other aspects of ANSI/RIA 15.06-1999. The revised safety standards are designed to isolate the machines in restricted work zones.

Worker injuries are less likely if a machine is equipped with vision, and vision-guided robots are coming into their own. They also are expanding applications into the processing areas of food plants, adding increasingly sophisticated quality inspections to rapid-motion tasks. In recent years, major potato processors have experimented with vision as a quality check on French fries being conveyed from storage to packaging. Vision systems proved adept at spotting fries with mold, but removing them begged for a robotics solution that wasn't available. Collaborations between robotics and vision experts are intended to close the gap.