Automation of Mobile Pick and Place Robotic System for Small Food Industry
This addresses automation challenges for small food producers, but it is incremental as it applies existing robotics technology to a specific domain.
The paper tackled automating a pick-and-place robotic system for small food industry by designing and implementing a microcontroller-based robot with a special gripper to handle unbaked biscuit trays into and out of a furnace, resulting in a reliable and high-performance system for biscuit manufacturing lines.
The use of robotics in food industry is becoming more popular in recent years. The trend seems to continue as long as the robotics technology meets diverse and challenging needs of the food producers. Rapid developments in digital computers and control systems technologies have significant impact in robotics like any other engineering fields. By utilizing new hardware and software tools, design of these complex systems that need strong integration of distinct disciplines is no longer difficult compared to the past. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to design and implement a micro-controller based on reliable and high performance robotic system for food / biscuit manufacturing line. We propose a design of a vehicle. The robot is capable of picking unbaked biscuits tray and places them into furnace and then after baking it picks the biscuits tray from the furnace. A special gripper is designed to pick and place the biscuits tray with flexibility.