Flour millers bag palletising solution
June 1st 2007 Allinson (Silverspoon), flour
millers in Bishops Stortford,
part of Associated British
Foods, along with their
consultants, Lorien
Engineering, chose
Greenstone Conveyor
Systems (GCS) to provide
them with a fully automatic,
end of the line robotic
palletising system. The
system collects bagged flour
from four packaging
machines, queues them on
accumulating conveyors,
prior to palletising, by twin
Fanuc pick and place robots.
Pallets are fed into the
system from a pallet
dispenser, via a space saving
trolley car system that feeds
them under the outfeed bag
accumulating conveyors.
Fully loaded pallets are
automatically transferred via
pallet conveyor to a pallet
stretch wrapping machine.
Once stretch wrapped, the
pallets are off-loaded by FLT
and removed for storage.
As bags of flour can vary
in height, dependant on the
type and time of year it is
milled, the robot's gripper is
fitted with a sensing
mechanism which
automatically adjusts the
constructed pallet height.
Robot movements are kept
to the minimum by the
collation of a complete row
of bagged flour, presented
to the robot in the correct
orientation for palletising.
The system runs five days a
week across three shifts,
handling up to 600 tonnes
of flour. More articles from Greenstone Conveyor Systems Ltd: | 
