Packaging

Packaging cells sit at the tail end of a food, personal-care, or consumer-goods line, so uptime here caps the throughput of whatever runs upstream. Products stream past on a conveyor, vision reads position and orientation, and the robot picks each item into a carton, tray, or wrapper without stopping the flow.

Cycles per minute drive the selection more than payload or reach. A cell running 90 to 120 picks per minute wants a delta overhead or a SCARA wrist, both built for low-inertia moves at high acceleration.

End effectors get sized for the individual product, so a single pouch or bottle plus a light suction cup or two-finger gripper. Cell layout has to leave room for infeed, outfeed, and vision without shadowing the pick point. Any change in line speed forces a re-tune of both belt tracking and grasp timing.

The failure modes to watch are quiet ones. A worn suction cup drops parts without setting a fault, conveyor tracking drifts after a belt splice, and vision confidence sags when someone swaps an overhead bulb for a cooler color temperature. Products stack at the reject lane until an operator notices.

Some packaging jobs don't reward a robot. Very high-speed flow wrapping runs on fixed-cam machinery that a robot cell can't catch on cycle time. Fragile, sticky, or deformable products stretch the definition of a clean pick, and vacuum, finger, and Bernoulli grippers each have their own tradeoffs there.

Food, dairy, and pharma lines add washdown-rated or IP69K construction, stainless housings, and food-grade lubricants at the wrist. On the floor that usually means a FANUC DR-3iB or ABB IRB 390 delta overhead, or a FANUC SR-6iA on flat lines running trays and small cartons. See also case packing and labeling.