Best with bottles

The Swedish company Cederroth International AB manufactures products for the health care, personal care, first aid and household sectors. So far Sweden has been the most significant market for the company, which has around 850 employees in 30 European countries. The strongest growing market for Cederroth at present is Eastern Europe.

Chosing the right partner
In November 2005 Cederroth commissioned Skinetta Pac-Systeme GmbH & Co. KG to provide a fully automated end-of-line packaging line for cosmetics bottles. Peripheral devices already present at the customer’s premises had to be integrated and the line had to be capable of packaging 14 different formats, 12 with trays and two without trays.

The running-in and the Factory Acceptance Test of the entire final packaging line were carried out by Skinetta at its principal works in Ottobeuren, Germany. One year after the order was placed, in November 2006, the line went into production at Cederroth.

Packaging application
The cosmetics bottles, which come in a wide variety of designs, are fed onto the feed belt of the Skinetta line as they come from a labeler. An IRB 1600 robot from ABB picks up the standing or lying bottles in a wide variety of shapes and positions with its vacuum gripper, depending on the grouping required, and places them in trays or positions them straight onto the running belt of the film wrapping machine, with the robot synchronized with the speed of the belt.

Conveyor tracking enables production to run continuously without having to pulse-run the belt. The result is high productivity. Once the grouping of the bottles is complete, they are wrapped in film and then fed into the shrinking tunnel. A labeler at the machine exit also sticks labels onto the bundle, which is then placed on a pallet by a second ABB robot, an IRB 6600.

The IRB 6600 always places two bundles onto the pallet following the palletizing scheme in such a way that the label always faces outwards. It also removes cushioning from a magazine and lays it onto a layer on the pallet. This is where the long reach of the IRB 6600 comes into play.

The cushioning boards are needed to stabilize the stack of pallets. Low-grade board is generally used as cushioning. The result of this is that the robot often sucks up two or three layers of cushioning. To avoid several boards being sucked up, the robot sucks up the board on one side and turns its vacuum plate through approximately 15°.

This causes the lower layers to loosen and drop back. A motion of this sort is feasible only with a 6-axis robot. The application imposes high demands on robot technology and control. It must be highly flexible because the design and grouping of products is constantly changing, and life cycle times are becoming shorter and shorter.

Demands on flexibility
As the system runs in two shifts, six days a week, high reliability is essential. The flexibility of the robot system makes it capable of meeting new demands in the future which may arise.

Cederroth today offers a variable, flexible packaging concept for bottles and upside-down bottles in the widest variety of shapes with and without trays. Reliable packaging of all bottle formats including upside-down bottles is assured.

The new final packaging line enables the customer to make optimized, rapid changes of format on all machines within around 20 minutes. An operator-friendly control concept with optional fault diagnostics complements this solution.