Takeda is a biopharmaceutical company. More than six billion tablets and capsules are produced at the Oranienburg site every year. This quantity of medicines has to be picked at the end of each production line and palletized ready for dispatch. Cartons weighing up to ten kilograms, for example, have to be handled at the end of a line. Over the course of a shift, this adds up to around five tons.

Takeda project manager Robert Gundlach: "Initially, however, the collaborative robot was not yet an issue." At the end of the project discussions with Fanuc, the argument prevailed that a cobot would not only relieve the strain on employees, but would also meet with much greater acceptance than a yellow robot behind a safety fence.

The packing table at the end of a tablet production line consists of a double workstation: the glass vials filled with tablets are packed several at a time into cartons. These cartons are continuously pushed onto the packing table, picked up in packs of five by two employees and placed in a carton. Once the carton is full, it is placed on a flexible, slightly inclined roller conveyor. At the end of the conveyor, a CR-15iA first scans the label and then picks up the carton so that it can be stacked on the pallet with the label facing outwards. While the employees change shifts, the robot operates 24/7. "The system has been running smoothly since mid-December," reports Gundlach.

"The relative flexibility of the design lies in the roller conveyor." This is a scissor roller conveyor that has a range of adjustment options and can simply be pushed to the side if required. This makes it easy to create space for maintenance or service work on the robot. In this case, manual palletizing could continue as before.

The station with the green Fanuc robot is just one of a total of 14 picking lanes at Takeda. The robot's task is actually just to place the cartons correctly on the pallet, always eight cartons per layer and four layers high - and with the label facing outwards. With a reach of 1,441 millimetres and a maximum payload, the Fanuc robot performs this task effortlessly. The travel speed permitted for collaborative operation is completely sufficient for operation. The vacuum suction gripper comes from Schmalz and also meets all the requirements for collaborative operation. A little gimmick: A small digital display shows how much vacuum is being used to hold the respective box.