Automatic Pick-and-Place Packaging System with Vacuum Lifter

Abstract

Flexible packaging manufacturing is one of the most essential industry of the world nowadays. This research aims to develop an economical & ergonomically designed pick-and- place sorting system for bag-making machines in the packaging industry. It provides a standard universal setup that is feasible to adapt with any type of bag-making machine as a pick-and-place attachment. This automated system can be installed at pickup location of the bag-making machine for the operation of pick-and-place of packaging bags, which is able to distribute packaging bags into the accepted bags platform without the supervision of a physical operator. This pick-and-place sorting system is able differentiate between two coloured bags while accepting the correct dimension of it to place it at a location of ‘accepted bag’ else at a location of ‘rejected bag’. The proposed machine system can sort-out three different dimensions of test samples by accepting bags with a fiducial mark and correct dimension only, while rejecting the bags without fiducial mark and of incorrect dimensions. A standalone mechanical structure based on stepper motors, electronics design and embedded control system was developed that includes an IR-proximity sensor, as a fiducial mark/colour detector and a loadcell based dimension analyser, to differentiate between different dimensions of the test samples.