Ensuring precise and reliable bottle pick-and-place

Natural products and robots, a contradiction? Not at all, as demonstrated by this automated filling system for liquid peat and herbal extracts. Full automation ensures maximum process reliability and protects high-value products from any contamination.

For over 50 years, the Austrian family-owned company SonnenMoor has relied on the health benefits of peat and herbal products. Recently, a robot-based system has taken over the filling of these premium products. The complete installation was developed by the Austrian specialist Stranger Maschinenbau.

The reasons for this investment were clear: to implement an automated, reliable and cost-efficient process, while increasing capacity to meet continuously growing demand and reducing the workload on production staff.

The only manual step is loading empty plastic bottles into a hopper, after which they are separated. At this stage, bottle orientation remains undefined, meaning they may enter the conveyor either neck-forward or base-forward.

This is where the Stäubli SCARA robot comes into play. It picks bottles from conveyor 1 and places them upright on conveyor 2, which feeds the filling station.

During this process, bottles pass through a vision tunnel where their positions are detected and transmitted to the robot controller. Using conveyor tracking, the Stäubli TS2-80 picks up to three bottles at a time with a triple-swing vacuum gripper and places them individually onto the second conveyor in an upright position.

The four-axis robot is synchronized with the conveyor speed to prevent bottles from tipping over. The missing fifth axis is compensated by a custom-designed gripping system developed by Stranger Maschinenbau, featuring a 90-degree rotation function. This eliminates the need for a six-axis robot while leveraging the high dynamics of the TS2 SCARA generation.

The bottles then move in line to the filling station and onto a rotary table with several stations, where caps are applied and screwed on. This is followed by weight control, labeling, marking and final packaging according to the product.

The system currently processes more than a dozen different peat and herbal extracts in four bottle sizes: 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 ml. Switching between around 60 variants can often be done directly via the control interface. If mechanical adjustments are required, changeover time remains under 20 minutes.

Maximum output reaches up to 3,000 bottles per hour for the 100 ml format. The filling system also fully meets expectations in terms of ease of operation.

Overall, SonnenMoor, Stranger and Stäubli successfully delivered this demanding project through close collaboration. The system meets all expectations: it is reliable, efficient, sustainable and highly productive, ensuring it can keep up with growing demand in the years ahead.