Industrial robots currently perform tasks such as food processing and handling, sorting, palletizing and packaging, and offer many potential benefits, including increased productivity, reduced material loss, product consistency and shorter lead times, among others.
The manufacturing industry has entered an important moment of transformation and upgrading, and more and more factories are beginning to utilize machine-to-machine to improve their competitiveness. Industrial robots will be human labor from the harsh working environment to liberate, and make the factory production efficiency to maximize. Therefore, the application space of industrial robots has further opened up, and the number of industrial robots used has been growing from automobile manufacturing to 3C electronics, food packaging, logistics and other fields, from 240,000 sales in 2015 to 381,000 in 2017, and it is expected to reach 630,000 units by 2021.
The food industry is a very large part of the manufacturing sector and an important market for robot applications. In recent years, the food manufacturing market environment is sending new changes. In the context of the rapid development of e-commerce, the growing demand for orders, while customers require more efficient and flexible packaging production, enterprises in the increase in production capacity at the same time to ensure quality. In addition, the demand for personalization has posed new challenges to enterprises. In order to cope with this change, more and more factory enterprises began to use industrial robots.
The use of industrial robots will change the food industry at the bottom, and will eventually lead to a smart manufacturing production model, able to fulfill customer orders within a few hours. Industrial robots currently perform tasks such as food processing and handling, sorting, palletizing and packaging, and offer many potential benefits, including increased productivity, reduced material loss, product consistency and shorter lead times. The new production model offers a high degree of flexibility and meets the need for small batch production of individualized products.
Machine for man creates new advantages for companies
Compared with the traditional human production model, robotic automation solutions bring higher capacity, making production services more economical and efficient. Moreover, as the demographic dividend gradually disappears and the cost of labor becomes more and more expensive, factories will prioritize robots to perform production tasks, not only to reduce costs, but also to reduce the chances of workplace injuries, as well as to improve the efficiency of production and grow the profit of the enterprise.
Food has very strict requirements for safety and hygiene, and traditional human methods may bring about contamination of food, while the use of robots can be a good solution to this problem, automated food processing is not affected by human beings. Robots in the food industry are treated with hot water and sterilization, which can well avoid the spread of bacteria and ensure the safety of food.
Industrial Robotics, Food Manufacturing
Robots can operate properly in extremely cold, high temperatures, and even lack of oxygen, which are not suitable environments for human beings, are not a problem for robots. And some food manufacturing may need to be handled at freezing temperatures, so the use of robots can enhance the quality of food products. In addition, robots are more precise, which not only ensures the consistency of the product, but also reduces the waste of ingredients.
Additionally, the use of robots can improve worker safety; food processing ensures worker safety by utilizing sharp, dangerous equipment, and these dangerous environmental tasks can be taken over by robots without the need for worker involvement. The production process makes humans uncomfortable, as well as those repetitive tasks that are prone to unpleasant emotions, and robots will be better suited to these positions than people because they will not get bored or tired.
Food manufacturing robot application scene
In the food industry in many places are able to use the robot, the current robot in the food industry is mainly packaging, palletizing, sorting, processing and other processes, of which the palletizing robot is the largest part of the use of almost half of the share of the entire food manufacturing industry robots.
Palletizing refers to stacking products of basically the same shape according to certain requirements, and is commonly used in production lines, warehouses and other scenarios. For some heavy items, it is out of fashion to use human labor to do stacking, which can easily cause sprains. Robots can quickly and efficiently complete the stacking of heavy products, which has become the most common application in the food industry. At present, domestic Yili, Wahaha and other food and beverage companies are using palletizing robots to improve the efficiency of production.
In addition to palletizing, food packaging is also a more widely used field of robotics. With the development of food refinement and diversification trends, small batch diversified packaging needs are becoming more and more obvious. Industrial robots have a high degree of flexibility, and can realize the packaging of multiple sizes and shapes of products on the same packaging line, and only need to adjust the parameters and end tools to complete new tasks. Therefore, industrial robots are favored by food packaging companies.
Industrial Robots, Food Manufacturing
There are many other applications of industrial robots in the food industry, such as food processing, robots can replace workers to carry out cutting, knifing, cleaning, grinding and many other tasks, combined with the Internet of Things sensors and artificial intelligence technology, robots can be more accurate than people, and can meet the demand for more and more high technology. There are also ingredients sorting, through the machine vision recognition technology, robots can pick and sort ingredients, not only to save manpower, but also to improve efficiency.