Industrial 4.0 Robotic Palletizer Selection Factors: How to Choose a Palletizer?

Today, many palletizing applications are still performed manually. Due to stress, injuries, errors, and inefficiencies caused by repetitive palletizing tasks, introducing robotic palletizing solutions can ensure you gain the flexibility, productivity, and reliability needed to meet shorter product lifecycles, new packaging designs, multiple packaging sizes and product variants, and batch production requirements.

Many logistics and warehouses are adopting robotic palletizing solutions to improve their time-to-market and cost-effectiveness. While addressing labor shortages, this allows employees to engage in higher-value-added tasks. By installing Industrial 4.0 robotic palletizers, it not only reduces handling costs, minimizes handling tasks and errors, but also reduces the risk of employee injuries.

What types of robots can be used for palletizing?

There are many models currently on the market that can help provide palletizing solutions. Selecting the right one for your specific application is crucial.

Factors that may influence selection:

• Payload type

• Materials

• Carton, cardboard type

• Payload size

• Payload weight

• Throughput

• Number of pallets per minute

• Footprint

Here are some common types of robots:

Collaborative robots

Small footprint, suitable for working in areas with humans (depending on robot speed), payload capacity up to 25 kg, safe. Using palletizers and collaborative robots can eliminate dangerous manual handling of loads.

Six-axis industrial robots

Flexible – suitable for various tasks within the workspace, with high payload capacity, high speed/high throughput.

Gantry-style palletizing robots

These robots have even higher payload capacity than all other types of robots.

• Safety

Risk assessment should be completed during cell implementation to ensure the environment around the robot and the robot itself are safe. Only after identifying risks and reducing them to acceptable levels can the machine be put into production.

For robotic palletizing cells, the following aspects need to be considered:

1. Payload and robot weight

2. Load speed

3. Product type (size, material, etc.)

4. Shape of all moving parts (presence of sharp edges, etc.)

Speed focuses on case opening, packing, case sealing, and palletizing, as well as robotic packaging and palletizing. We are a leading downstream automated packaging solution provider with years of industry experience, looking forward to collaborating with you.