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Traditional brewing meets automation: KR QUANTEC PA stacks crates of beer
The private brewery Christian Fiedler from the Saxon village of Oberscheibe produces premium beers with 18 employees according to the good old German art of brewing. In times of a shortage of skilled workers, the company opted for a palletizing station with a KUKA robot and is delighted.
At the Christian Fiedler private brewery in the tranquil village of Oberscheibe in the Saxon Ore Mountains, there is a robot-assisted palletizing station at the entrance to the bottling plant. "Our latest gem," says Christian Fiedler, senior boss of the family business. A 5-axis KUKA KR 180 PA robot from the QUANTEC series loads and unloads entire layers of beer crates, both full and empty, in incoming and outgoing goods. "This not only makes physically heavy work much easier for us, but also gives us new opportunities to deploy our skilled workers better and with less wear and tear in other areas," emphasizes Fiedler.
The system was installed by Beyer Maschinenbau GmbH from Roßwein, another family business. "We held our first talks with Fiedler about automated bottle palletizing back in 2005," recalls Managing Director Till Beyer. However, the company then implemented more urgent projects before pursuing the automation plan in 2018.
Robot grabs up to four crates of beer at the same time
The technology for this is provided by a 5-axis KUKA KR QUANTEC PA - an all-rounder with a modular design. It can move payloads of up to 180 kilograms. At Fiedler, the robot picks up up to four crates of beer at the same time with its gripper. It lifts the incoming empties from the pallet onto the conveyor system and the crates coming from the bottling line from the roller conveyor directly onto the pallet. 800 bottles in 40 crates can thus be accommodated on a Euro pallet, which are transported from the palletizing system by forklift truck to the outgoing warehouse or directly onto the truck.
It should also be possible to integrate the automation technology digitally into the running processes as easily as possible. As the interface between the robot and the machine controller, KUKA.PLC mxAutomation enables simple commissioning, programming and diagnostics of every KUKA robot via the PLC - user-friendly even without special robot programming knowledge. Almost all functions of the robot controllers can be called up via the PLC; KUKA.PLC mxAutomation also offers robot libraries for all known PLC controllers on the market.
Next automation steps in planning
Father and son are convinced of the private brewery's automation strategy. "It creates the basis for the consistently high quality of our premium beers," Thomas Fiedler is convinced. He is therefore already planning the next steps in automation: "Our next step is to modernize the barrel filling process," he says, referring to the high demand and the shortage of skilled workers in the brewing industry.
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