Position determination and shape control of packaging

In the food industry, safe packaging and cardboard boxes play an important role in terms of transport and storage. Countless times they have to be manually or fully automatically stacked and palletized or depalletized by humans and robots. This often results in a deformation of the individual packages, which makes fully automatic handling difficult or impossible.

With the help of a 3D structure light, the position can be determined and shape tolerances can be detected reliably. For this purpose, the system is installed vertically above the respective pallet. It is able to determine the coordinates of the cardboard boxes in space and transfer them to the robot. In addition, the system can use its 2D image to determine a possible box division and alignment of the cover flaps. Communication with the robot controller is via TCP/IP interface. In parallel, the system is also able to communicate with the higher-level PLC control system via profinet protocol. In cooperation with the system manufacturer, a calibration routine has been integrated which enables automatic recalibration of camera and robot without manual intervention by the operator.

Thanks to its flexibility, modularity and processor performance, the system is able to implement a downstream machine vision task cost-effectively on the same process computer.