Food & Beverage Asia June/July 2020

MARKET INSIGHTS
17
Are cobots the helping
hand in the food industry
of tomorrow?
With a growing population to feed, embracing technology and automation
empowers food and beverage manufacturers to enhance productivity and
efficiency. Darrell Adams, Head of South East Asia and Oceania, Universal
Robots, pens the importance of automation and robotics in the food market,
and provides an overview of the extent robotics are being used in today’s
food and beverage industry.
In the 1519 work Vulgaria, the
author William Horman used
the Latin phrase Mater atrium
necessitas, which translates
as “necessity is the mother of
innovation”. And in the 21st century,
Horman’s verse hits home with the surge
in automation in the food and beverage
industry.
Consumers are the arbiter of success
with ever increasing sophistication and
demands, and they increasingly push food
companies to turn to automation to help
achieve higher efficiency and productivity,
higher production consistency, while
achieving higher profitability.
Although automating food production
can reap many benefits, the need for high
capital investments and safety concerns
restricted the adoption to some extent.
With fast changing consumer habits
especially in hectic metropolitan cities
pressed for time, a rising demand for
processed and advanced packaged foods,
and more stringent food safety regulations
are driving food companies large and small
to consider automation.
This is when a new class of robots,
collaborative robots (cobots), are the ideal
fit for automation of repetitive processes
while retaining high safety considerations
in food production.
What are cobots?
Traditional industrial robots are caged
within a fence since getting too close
can be dangerous. Cobots, on the other
hand, are designed to be inherently safe
to operate alongside human workers
without a physical barrier subject to risk
assessment. They are intentionally built to
operate in close proximately with humans,
and physically interacting with humans to
perform their tasks, in a shared workplace.
If the cobot encounters an obstacle in its
path, it automatically stops operation to
ensure the safety of human operators. The
range of parameters such as force, speed
and power can be adjusted to minimise the
risk of injury, and the safety boundaries
can be restricted to minimise contact with
operators.
Flexible rotation of all joints allows a
cobot to operate even in confined spaces.
They have been easily adapted even for
medical uses in surgery theatres, attesting
to precision, safety and operating in tight
confines.
These cobots can be mounted on floors,
ceilings, walls, wheels and many other
deployment methods as required. Instead
of requiring skilled programmers, cobots
come with a tablet-sized touchscreen
user interface, where the user guides the
robot arm by indicating movements on the
screen, or by physically guiding the arm.
Cobots can perform motions close to the
dexterity and micro-precision of a human
arm, by mimicking the movements of its
human trainer.
These characteristics of cobots, previously
not found in traditional industrial robots,
open up applications in the food industry
that were previously not possible. For
these reasons, Cascina Italia, an egg
supplier, decided on implementing cobots
on their factory floor when they needed to
automate their processes.
‘Eggciting’ changes
Faced with the extreme competition in the
fresh food market, Cascina Italia needed
to improve productivity and react quickly
to market demands.
At Cascina Italia, millions of eggs are
processed every day. In the past, the
repetitive and non-ergonomic task of
picking and placing trays of eggs was
done by hand. Traditional robots would
have been prohibitively expensive and
difficult to implement into a live production
environment. Safety is also a major concern
as there is limited space for additional
equipment while human operators need to
occupy the same confined space.
FOOD & BEVERAGE ASIA JUNE / JULY 2020