Complex Carton Packaging with Dexterous Robot Hands

Product packaging is one of the key industrial sectors where automation is of paramount interest. Any product going out to the consumer requires some form of packaging, be it food products, gift packaging or the medical supplies. Hence there is continuous demand of high-speed product packaging. This requirement is dramatically increased with seasonal consumer products and fancy gifts, which invite innovative designs and attractive ideas to lure the potential customers. Typically such products are delivered in cardboard cartons with delicate and complex designs. Packaging of such designs is not only tedious and challenging but also time consuming and monotonous, if manual methods are employed. For simple cardboard packaging fixed automation has been in use by dedicated machines along a conveyor belt system, however, these machines can handle only simple type of cartons; any change in shape and structure cannot be easily incorporated into the system. They require, in most cases, a change of more than 40 points (Dai, 1996a) to fit into the same type of carton of different dimensions, which means one specific type of cartons requires one packaging line. Capital expenditure increases with the change-over (Dai, 1996b) from one type to another type of carton folding assembly lines. Thus the flexibility is lost due to these limitations and the associated cost in the change-over. This research demonstrates the feasibility of designing a versatile packaging machine for folding cartons of complex geometry and shapes. It begins by studying cartons of different geometry and shapes and classifying them into suitable types and operations that a machine can understand. It conceptualizes a machine resorting to modeling and simulation that can handle such cartons, and finally developing the design of the packaging machine. It has been shown that such a versatile machine is a possibility, all it requires is miniaturization and investment on its development when such machines could be a reality. However, for practical implementation considerations need to be given for a compact, portable system incorporating sensors. The presented design is unique in its existence and has been shown to fold cartons of different complexity.