Crates

When palletizing crates, a sheet of cardboard or film can be placed on the content of the crate in advance. A Spider can also be used to destack empty crates, after which they can be fed to the filling lines. Once filled, the crates can be palletized by the same or a second Spider, depending on the speed. With nestable crates, the orientation of the crate is taken into account and, if necessary, the crates are rotated 180° before being palletized. After depalletizing empty folded crates, they are automatically unfolded and transported to the filling lines. An additional difficulty when palletizing and destacking crates is the fact that they are always in column on the pallet and the different columns can therefore be slightly open like a funnel.

By centering the layers, the crates are held together. Because the Spider is a portal robot with a long vertical Z-axis, it can also easily palletize crates and destack them between high panels. An automatic strapping machine can also be built into the Spider.

For the transport of full and empty crates from and towards the Spider, a central conveyor belt, which is set up in a carousel, can be used. No identification such as barcode or RFID tags on the crates is required to transport the correct empty crates to the different prodcution lines and to palletize the full crates on the right pallet.