The Tiesse Robot’s mission it is to offer innovative and customised solutions in industrial automation processes and to pay particular attention to the needs of its clientele.
(video: Tiesse Robot)

Packaging of vol-au-vent in thermoformed blisters

Mr. Perrino, owner of Sfoglia Torino, the Italian company leader in this field (annual production of over 2,500,000 packs), submitted a specific request to Tiesse team, consisting of the feasibility analysis for the construction of a robotized line that would allow the packaging of a range of products with diameters of 38, 50 and 60 mm to be located in thermoformed blisters having variable containment niches.

The main problem in setting up the project concerned the fact that the elements to be manipulated had not defined shapes, such as a mechanical component, but being the result of a forming and cooking process, they would have had heterogeneous texture, shape and size tolerances.

**Tiesse Robot designed a fully automated line. (photo: Tiesse Robot)**

The product leave the cooking oven by a motorized conveyor with plastic mesh

Tiesse Robot technical staff, through a continuous exchange of ideas with the end-user, was able to respond efficiently and quickly to the request, by designing a fully automated line that performs the whole process.

Conceptually, the system is fed by a motorized conveyor with plastic mesh suitable for the food environment which receives the product leaving the cooking oven via a cooling conveyor, with a cadence of several hundred pieces to be processed per minute.

Therefore the first path section of the conveyor developed by Tiesse has the task of creating an alignment and a distance among the products.

This permits that they can be manipulated by the packaging robots.

A further counter-flow belt allows to recover and put back in circle the product that has not been processed by robots in order to improve efficiency of the system for Packaging of vol-au-vent.

Four Kawasaki YF03 parallel kinematics robots with vision system

The actual packaging station is essentially composed of a cabin inside which there are four Kawasaki YF03 parallel kinematics robots equipped with vol-au-vent gripping devices, TS-Vision, the vision system developed by Tiesse with four cameras for robot guidance and one for blisters filling and check, beside the use of a line supervisor designed and developed by Tiesse R&D department.

The cameras for robot guidance transmit the product pick-up coordinates to robots, and the supervisor coordinates the robot gripping sequences taking into account data of vision and conveyor continuous feeding flow. (foto 30 foto 5)

High dynamics over a large work area for Packaging of vol-au-vent

In parallel to robot containment cabinet there is a continuous Colimatic thermoforming machine which thermoforms the blisters, ranging from 6 to 24 niches, in which vol-au-vent shall be placed, and then completes blister wrapping covering with plastic film sealed on the edges.

The operation of Kawasaki robots is a strong point, as it guarantees a high dynamics over a large work area, which has to cover both the blister area and the vol-au-vent feeding conveyor, since this must always work with the part in motion and consequently to “chase” its position during picking step.
The quantity of operating robots was decided according to high cadences required.

The gripper with three suction cups for pick and place

During designing step Tiesse Robot had to carry out some computer simulations and real tests in order to evaluate which gripping system would have been the most suitable one for elements with such variable shape.

Considering that the product is intrinsically fragile, being puff pastry, Tiesse had also to ensure that gripping would not cause damages to the part. Finally it was defined a gripper with three suction cups with independent vertical movement, that allows picking and placing three products simultaneously inside their thermoformed.

The constant cooperation between Tiesse Robot technical team and the customer

In order to make also filling steps more performing, Tiesse installed a further vision system, which gives the possibility to check the filling status of the blister, to drive the last robot of the chain with special cycles and, in case of one or more missing parts in the blister, to integrate them.

The development of the system involved a constant cooperation between Tiesse Robot technical team and the customer, in order to improve the vol-au-vent forming and cooking process carried out by customer and, as regards Tiesse, to determine with extremely high precision all variables relating to the grip of the part and the cadence required by the line.

The brilliant achievement obtained is the result of a positive synergy, as well as the application of customized modular solutions made possible thanks to a long experience (Tiesse has been operating since 1976) and to state-of-the-art technology in the industrial robotics.