YASKAWA premiere at BrauBeviale 2019

Robot packs bottles fast and with a firm grip.

At BrauBeviale 2019 (Hall 7A / 7A-424) YASKAWA will be showcasing an all-in-one solution for the robot-based handling of bottles in the form of the newly developed “Air Grip World”. The system ensures reliable, flexible and fast loading and unloading of crates or boxes.

“Air Grip World” combines the patented Air Grip gripper technology with the appropriate MOTOMAN robot, including the entire system environment: grippers, manipulator, robot controller, PLC, control panel (HMI) and frequency inverter were all supplied by YASKAWA, and complement each other to form a simple and functioning technical solution.

The cell is mounted on a mobile platform. Not only is the system quickly commissioned – it can also be relocated as needed with a forklift truck. The plant capacity is around 1,200 bottles per hour or one box per minute, whereby the plant itself has box erecting and closing devices. This space-saving and flexible handling solution is thus ideal for use in small and medium-sized facilities. A sorting table with optionally one or two robots permits automatic feeding of individual glass bottles.

The special features of the system are the sturdy and durable patented grippers that can be individually configured. Thanks to their modular design, in the rare case of a malfunction they are simple to maintain and repair. This was also a convincing argument for the operators of large-scale packaging facilities.

Field-proven in the beverage industry

Norwegian Roma Mineralvannfabrikk AS is one of the many breweries and beverage manufacturers that uses the AirGrip gripper system including sorting table. Its facility employs two YASKAWA MOTOMAN robot models:
a 5-axis heavy-duty MOTOMAN SP800 robot with a payload of 800 kg and a 4-axis MOTOMAN MPL500 palletizing robot with a capacity of 500 kg. Since its bottling capacity increased, the company has experienced a growth in sales of about 30%.

MOTOMAN robots are also being used successfully in other areas of the beverage industry, e.g. for palletizing. In the Paderborn brewery, for example, returned empties are accurately handled by a MOTOMAN MPL500 II at a rate of up to 1,000 crates per hour. About 15 to 20 employees would be needed to do the sorting manually – a physically demanding job that is not reconcilable with the generally high degree of automation of the state-of-the-art bottling plant.

For more information, please visit: https://www.yaskawa.eu.com/