Douwe Egberts

The challenge at Douwe Egberts played on two levels. First, the 14 production lines had to be palletised centrally in the most limited space possible and second, the cartons and bundles of these production lines had to be transported from hundreds of meters away to the central palletizing cell. Because all moving parts of a Spider gantry robot are located above the work surface and multiple bridges can be active in the same portal frame, we were able to provide a central palletizing cell in a very limited space. 7 robot bridges were mounted in two long portal frames.

Via two central very fast rotating conveyors set up in a carousel, all cartons are pushed onto these conveyors via servo pushers and sorted to the infeed conveyors of the Spider palletizers by product. All this happens without the use of product identification. Stacks of empty pallets are stored in an automatic warehouse from where they are fed to a destacker. The unstacked empty pallets are fed to the palletizing positions. The full pallets are transported via a pallet conveyor to two high-performance pallet wrappers, after which a pallet label is automatically applied. The whole is visualized on various PCs and production orders are automatically forwarded. The installation at Douwe Egberts is an example of a total solution, in which various peripheral machinery were integrated in addition to the Spiders.