Students: Loran Okkerman, Pepijn Brozius, Kaj van Beest, Job Valkenburg
EUROFINS ANALYTICO B.V. ANNOUNCES AUTOMATED BOTTLING SOLUTION TO ENABLE LABORATORIES TO INCREASE EFFICIENCY AND REDUCE MANUAL LABOR
An robotic system that optimizes the placement of glass bottles intro crates, reducing manual labor an increasing efficiency in laboratory operations.
Delft, Netherlands – 25 June 2024
Eurofins Analytico is an environmental laboratory. They use a lot of glass work (mainly bottles) in different sizes. There warehouse is distributing these bottles in plastic crates to the different departments in the lab. Glasswork is coming in sealed packages on pallets. The manual process opening sealed packages and putting bottles in crates takes a lot of time and is labor intensive.
The bottles must be filled in crates. Now this is performed by hand. This process needs to be optimized. Eurofins Analytico uses 4 types of bottle formats. The problem involved here is that the different formats of bottles does not have the same amount of bottles in a package. The diameters of the vial openings are also in different in sizes. The bottles are completely sealed with plastic, so the solution must be designed to accommodate this.
To address these problems, a Doosan, collaborative robot (cobot) is being used. The cobot replaces the intensive human work that is performed by Eurofins Analytico. To detect the packets, a YOLO algorithm that uses oriented bounding boxes is used. To cope with the different sizes of bottles, a tube is used that can accommodate all diameters of the orifices. The bottles are suctioned from the inside by a vaccuum suction cup. All these solutions are located on an End of arm tool (EOAT). To remove the plastic, we designed a cutting station consisting of a linear guide controlled by a motor.
The plastic packages are located on a pallet. To detect these packages, the program is started and begins detecting the packages. These packages are not always straight on a pallet so the orientation must be determined. When a package is located it is sucked in with vaccuum suction cups and taken to the “Cutting station”. Here the plastic is removed. This is handled from the bottom. Here a cross is cut. So that the plastic can be pulled off with the EOAT. This keeps the bottles upright and allows them to be pushed onto a conveyer belt. The bottles are pushed onto the conveyer belt into a hopper, which will place them one by one in a fixed location. Because the bottles have different sizes, an adjustable mechanism was designed that is regularly used in automation from here the bottles are picked up from the inside and placed down in the orange crates. When a crate is filled, a new crate comes in for filling. This process is carried out until the pallet is empty.
With this redevelopment, we have taken a big step forward in automation.
- Martin Janssen, Employee at Eurofins Analytico