Reduced cost is the holy grail
Why does the UK food and drink industry invest so little in automation and robots? According to the British Automation and Robots Association (BARA), 1,100 robots were sold in the UK in 2003. The majority (800) were bought by the car industry. Yet food and drink, which makes up Britain’s biggest manufacturing sector, bought just 40.
So why does the food industry have such a poor appetite for automation?
Robot supplier RTS Flexible Systems of Manchester, in conjunction with the Food Processing Faraday, the Northwest Food Alliance and BARA, spent the early part of this year quizzing 400 senior food industry engineers and decision makers about their views on automation and robots. The big names such as Masterfoods, Dairy Crest, Heinz and Cadbury, and others were all asked for their views.
The results are pretty clear. Most people felt the cost of equipment was the main barrier to investment in automation and that the financial case wasn’t helped by the short-term nature of contracts with retailers and cost squeezing by them.
However, most respondents thought UK food firms were not using automation enough and that they would soon have to invest more to beat their competitors, both at home and abroad. All 400 said they planned to use more automation in the future.
The benefits of automation were well recognised, says RTS, especially among established users. The key benefits were seen as reduced labour costs and improved production efficiency. Companies also felt that automation could increase their capacity through higher speeds and continuous production, as well as improving hygiene and reducing health and safety risks such as repetitive strain injury.
“The survey suggests there is a tremendous untapped potential for the UK food industry to achieve cost and production benefits through automation,” says RTS md David Bradford. “The good news is that there are no absolute barriers to automation. Our conclusions are that the barriers identified appear to be mainly perceptions, and that they can be overcome with greater knowledge of the possibilities that robotic and automated technologies now afford.”
Bradford’s hopes for greater adoption of robotics by the food sector are backed up by figures from Frost & Sullivan’s latest analysis of the European market for automation and robotics in the food industry. According to Kashyap Chandraseka, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, the use of robots in the food industry is set to grow at around 17% per year over the next seven years. “The market for robots in the food industry is growing, there is no doubt about it,” he says, with packaging and palletising accounting for about two-thirds of applications.
All the main robot manufacturers are now focusing their efforts on the food industry, says Chandraseka, by developing easier-to-use systems to overcome the perception within food companies that robots are complicated and difficult to use.
But there is a conflict within the robot industry, says Chandraseka. Robots are expensive and it tends to be only the big firms that can afford them. However, the robot’s biggest benefit is its flexibility and yet the big food companies don’t want flexibility, argues Chandraseka, they want output.
“It is the smaller companies that have the biggest need for flexibility, he says. “But they don’t have the money to invest in robots. They want cheaper robots - it is an issue that robot manufacturers will have to address.”
Not designed for food industry
Professor Darwin Caldwell at the Centre for Robotics and Automation at Salford University couldn’t agree more. Except for one or two examples in packaging and palletising, robots are not designed for the food industry, they’re designed for the car industry, he says.
They are fast, precise and can handle heavy payloads. As a result, they are too expensive for the food industry, and they are big and heavy and can’t be washed down.
The answer, argues Caldwell, is to make robots cheaper. And the way to do that is to make the specification of the robot less stringent - lower payload, lower speed, lower accuracy. “Yes, your robot isn’t so good, but do you need a robot with a big payload and high precision in the food industry?” An industrial robot moves at 10m/s, says Caldwell. “Move a food product at that speed and there’s a good chance it will end up splashed all round your factory!”
And so Caldwell and Professor John Gray, director of the robotics and automation centre, are hoping to put together a proposal for funding under the European Union’s Framework 7 research programme to design a robot more suited to the food industry.
The biggest challenge for the so-called Grail project will be to design the right grippers because, if the product is to remain affordable, then “we can’t try to emulate the human hand,” says Caldwell. Instead, the scheme will look at the specifications of food products and build a bespoke robot. “We want a robot designed for a food product, not to handle part of a Mondeo.” FM
Robots suited to pig processing at abattoirs
An integrated sausage manufacturing and packaging line was a central feature at last month’s Anuga FoodTec show in Cologne, organised in conjunction with the German Agricultural Society (DLG). The display, involving over 20 companies - including those supplying automated handling and control; smart vision systems; and robotics - was designed to highlight the potential uses of robots in food manufacture.
The line, capable of processing 200 sausages a minute, incorporated ‘clean-room’ production conditions within the operational envelope.
Sausages randomly fed on to a conveyor belt were scanned using an intelligent ‘knowledge based’ vision system called Ulixes from Imt Robot. The vision system controlled a robot to reposition sausages into regular groups of five. A second robot then collected the sausages and vacuum packed them into trays.
The packs subsequently passed through a vacuum check for sealing integrity before being checkweighed and robotically palletised and wrapped in flexible film.
A seminar devoted to robotics in food manufacture was also run at Anuga. This outlined the latest developments, such as stainless steel robots specifically designed for use in wet and potentially corrosive food manufacturing environments where sterility is critical and regular clean-downs are the norm.
Peter Fornoff, key technology manager for food with Kuka Roboter, described how his company had overcome the problems of operating in food environments.
In one particular example he described, a production line of four six-axis industrial robots with protective ‘hygienic suits’ had been installed at a German abattoir for processing 600 pigs an hour.
The Westfleisch abattoir in Coesfeld uses four Kuka robots to improve efficiency. After cleaning slaughtered pigs, the machines cut off their front trotters, bore out their rectums and open up the pig carcasses. A three-dimensional laser measuring system is used to accurately position the robots in relation to the carcasses they are working on.
With Kuka supplying similar set-ups to two other abattoirs, and Westfleisch planning to expand its use of robotics, automation of high volume primary meat processing plants is clearly set to grow. “We think the fully automated slaughter house is the future,” says Fornoff.
KEY CONTACTSCentre for Robotics and Automation 0161 295 5952 DLG 00 49 69 24788 237Frost & Sullivan 020 7730 3438Imt Robot 00 49 711-95260Kuka Automation and Robotics 0121 585 0800RTS Flexible Systems 0161 777 2000
