CAMotion recently announced that they had been working with Cargill''s Excel "case-ready" meat-packing facility to automate the placing of packed meat products into shipping-ready totes. High-volume meat packing plants have previously been unable to take advantage of automating mundane labor-intensive tasks due to the wide variety and weight of packages and packing patterns required over constantly changing high-speed production runs.
The gantry machine and controller has been operating since December, 2003 and was installed as a joint commercialization project between CAMotion and Georgia Tech''s Agricultural Technology Research Program, with support from FoodPAC (an element of the State of Georgia''s Traditional Industries Program).
What is unique about this application is that it had been beyond the reach of cost-effective automation. CAMotion uses patented and proprietary control algorithms developed at Georgia Tech to make lightweight gantries move relatively heavy payloads at amazingly fast speeds. The capital cost of a CAMotion optimized robot can have a payback time of less than a year in a high-volume plant.
"The system has exceeded our expectations," says Jason Prince, project manager at Excel''s Newnan Case-Ready plant. "Affordable automation solutions for these kinds of tasks are needed to keep our plants competitive and to help eliminate difficult manual tasks from the production process. The casepacker has given us the opportunity to automate the task of placing product into the totes along with performing a final quality inspection on every tray using the inline vision inspection system. This has resulted in reducing the labor requirements on the line while ensuring that our high quality standards are met."
The CAMotion controller runs on an open source platform based on the Linux operating system. A control panel in English and Spanish lets the operator select the product SKU from a library of available production runs.