German Brewing Company Automates its Operations with KUKA Robots

A German Brewing company, Pyraser has installed two KUKA KR 150 robots for automating the operations in its plant.

The company is a family owned business and they decided on optimising their operations by adopting advanced technology. This move to automate guarantees shorter cycle times, high flexibility and gentle handling. The KUKA KR 150 robots come with pneumatic grippers, each gripper works for one shift, three days a week. The brewing company was able to reduce the space which was earlier occupied by conventional machinery by 150 m² by using the six axis jointed arm robots. The cost for installing the KR 150s was almost the same when compared to conventional machine cost.

One of the robots is responsible for removing four crates containing 80 empty bottles at a time from the conveyor while the other robot places as many full bottles into the empty crates and places them on the conveyor. To complete a single cycle, the robots need 9 seconds for filling and 9.6 seconds for emptying. The extra time for emptying is consumed when the robot makes measurements for positioning the top end of the empty bottles to avoid colliding with them. There is no need for extra sensors as the crates are aligned centrally to enable handling in a two-dimensionally defined position, the only variable dimension being the height. In order to avoid system failure and the manual interventions that would follow, the robots are programmed in such a way that they reduce their speed by 10 % of the usual speed after two unsuccessful attempts to grip bottles. Simultaneously, they increase the gripping pressure. This method of handling bottles or crates helps the robots lift crates off conveyors easily.