“Our solutions offer a hygiene design for the highest of standards”

Mr Burhenne, high quality requirements, short-term fluctuations in demand and varying operating personnel are typical of the challenges faced by food producers. How can robot-aided automation help to overcome them?
Dirk Burhenne: Automation solutions involving robots contribute to increasing productivity with lower staffing levels – and with lower costs. However, the ever-increasing hygiene requirements and quality standards are also a clear advantage for robot technology. Overall, it leads to higher cost effectiveness in the long term thanks to its high flexibility, precision and repetition accuracy. This can also prove very interesting for smaller companies that often have to cope with numerous product changes involving small batches.

Does robot-aided automation consequently help to make production more efficient and therefore more sustainable?
With their above-mentioned flexibility and precision, highly-automated line solutions ensure consistent processes and therefore constant quality and less waste. This runs through the entire production process and concerns both the product itself and the packaging material and, ultimately, also energy consumption.

Which process steps can be automated with the Stäubli robots?
In addition to classic applications such as loading and unloading, sorting and packaging, our robots are increasingly taking over tasks involving direct contact with foods. Besides loading slicers with large sausages or blocks of cheese at the start of the packaging line, for instance, these also include the area in which sausage, meat, cheese and other foods are packaged in thermoformers or trays. Added to these are tasks such as removing bones or peeling fruit and vegetables.

If you take a look at the production conditions in the food industry, it becomes clear that hygiene standards which are difficult to meet as well as daily cleaning and disinfection procedures are often a knockout criterion for classic industrial robots. Where and when do robots encounter their limits here?
The cleaning agents used in the area of hygiene within the food industry are an insurmountable obstacle for the majority of robots, meaning that they are either not used here or have to be operated with a protective cover. That not only limits their working range. Regarded in hygiene terms, it is also only a compromise solution for food manufacturers, because the robot then inevitably becomes a ‘wear part’ and thus a cost factor.

And how does Stäubli meet these requirements?
We have been tackling this issue for 15 years now. With our Humid Environment series, or HE, robots, we offer a product with protection category IP67 that can permanently withstand processes involving the use of cleaning agents in the pH range from two to twelve. No other robot manufacturer in the four- and six-axis segment can do that at present.

Above all, particularly stringent hygiene regulations apply when four- and six-axis machines come into direct contact with open foods …
This is why the recommendations of the European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG) and the input from our customers in the food industry were critical for us when we were designing the HE robots. This culminated in the TS2 he series for our SCARA models and the TX2 he series for the six-axis robots.

What characterises the robots?
Both model series have a specially coated surface that can not only withstand the above mentioned cleaning agents, but which also virtually eliminates product adhesion thanks to its extremely low roughness. The completely encapsulated design and the use of special screws as well as the internally positioned supply and media lines that are routed from below in the robots’ base additionally ensure the strict avoidance of disturbing contours and dead spaces in which products can accumulate. In addition, Stäubli’s own gears for the HE series only use H1 oil, which enables the robots to operate without any performance limitations. We offer a hygiene design for the highest of standards.

The fact that robots are involved in an increasing number of processes in the direct processing area is also attributable to the use of camera-guided robotics – an application area that transforms the robots into ‘seeing production equipment’ thanks to image processing. Which new opportunities does this offer food producers?
Without the use of intelligent vision systems, the use of robotics would not be possible at all in many places in the food industry. This is true of classic pick and place applications, whereby the systems transfer the gripping positions to the robots, up to and including determining the size, geometry, contour, shape and density of products in order to analyse them for packaging processes or processing processes requiring precise weights. Quality control is another extensive application area, from simple label checks on packages to complex product analyses.

What role does artificial intelligence play in such application scenarios?
A crucial one, because AI has made many of these applications possible in the first place. Its use in the food sector is infinite. It therefore offers numerous new opportunities, particularly in the case of natural products such as foods, with their diverse shapes, sizes and characteristics. This particularly applies to processing areas that would not be possible in this way without this technology. No matter whether this concerns processing meat, fish and poultry or fruit and vegetables, but also in food safety and quality assurance, of course.

Can you give us an example of such an application?
Japan’s Mayekawa has been using our HE robots in its Hamdas systems for years for deboning hams and shoulder hams, for instance. I like to refer to this as the ‘premium class’. The hams and shoulder hams are hung in a conveyor system and transported on it throughout the entire process, so the ham’s position is always fixed. In the first station, the product is moved through an X-ray system in which the position of the bone is determined. These data are sent to the robots, which then separate the meat from the bone very precisely using a knife. Last year, Mayekawa also presented its new Celldas system.

What can that system do?
It is significantly more flexible, because it can be used to debone different products. The products are forwarded to the processing cell on belt systems. The core of the system is a detection unit consisting of an X-ray 3D scanner and an AI system that undertake product measurement and bone de

Cobots are also regarded as one of the key technologies in robotics. Are these technologies an option for food manufacturers?
The term cobot is on everyone’s lips at the moment, but I regard its use in the food sector as more nuanced. In the food industry, we often have high cycle outputs, little space and high staff and product traffic in the space that actually is available, and all in the hygiene area. This makes it difficult to implement cobot applications, although there are occasionally some very good solutions, of course. In applications in which cycle outputs are not crucial or where the cobot can work hand-in-hand with the employee, for example.

Does Stäubli offer such a solution?
We’re taking a slightly different approach here with our POWER cobot series. Our TX2touch models offer our standard six-axis kinematics with all of their features and advantages. This is supplemented by touch-sensitive skin. In cooperation with our CS9 controller, which already comes complete with all safety functions as standard, we can implement human-machine applications of safety category SIL3-PLe with the usual dynamics, agility and path accuracy familiar from our TX2 models. Naturally, H1 oil is used for the food sector.

Which new solutions is Stäubli working on for the food industry?
At present, we are working towards further refining and supplementing our solutions for the hygienic food production environment in order to extend our lead in this regard and to prepare ourselves for future requirements in the area of food processing, particularly in combination with AI as well.