Norwegian meat producer Nortura needed to optimize palletizing, but with limited floor space and a tight budget. A UR10 robot with a ceiling-mounted vision system provided a cost-effective and high-performance palletizing system in one-fifth of the space typically required. This is why Nortura now has three UR10 robots and a better work environment with no unnecessary heavy lifting. If no pallet is present, the floor space is available for other processes. Typical palletizing robots require a large fixed cell with safety caging that takes up extensive floor space. Nortura wanted to be able to palletize continuously without stopping the production line, but needed the flexibility of using the space for other processes if there were no pallets in place.
With a limited budget, Nortura had the added challenge of finding a cost-effective 6-axis robot that had the required range and payload capacity to stack boxes of different sizes and weights at different heights on a pallet. The robot also needed to be flexible and easy to program to work with the vision system, and reliable enough to run with minimal supervision.