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De-palletising bags is now automatic thanks to AZO

AZO automates bag unloading with Siemens AI Bin Picking: higher efficiency, fewer errors, and one step closer to the factory of the future.

Emptying bags of up to 25 kg into a machine places considerable strain on operators. AZO NV therefore designed a robotic solution for a baby food producer that removes the bags from the pallet as well as a machine that then hygienically cuts them open. A technical feat with AI vision technology from Siemens.

Hygiene first in baby food

Manufacturers of milk powder make lots of varieties with different mixtures of vitamins and minerals for different ages. Not to mention the many allergies they have to take into account. As a result, large silos are rare in production. The production runs are small and the raw materials usually come in bags.

At the same time, they have to follow very strict hygiene requirements. Not an easy challenge, as bags are difficult to process by machine. They are heavy, irregular in shape and can tear easily. “A customer asked us to build a machine that hygienically cuts open the bags,” says Corné Daane, Sales Branch Manager Vital at AZO NV.

“With successful results. We designed a machine with few moving parts, which is easy to clean and fully enclosed. As a result, the environment remains dust-free and we have virtually no product loss. We hygienically vacuum off the powder released during cutting, keeping it usable. Afterwards, a compactor screw neatly extracts the bag from the machine again.”

AZO - hygiene first

Automatic de-palletising

“The bags arrive on pallets. Our client had the idea of having its production lines fed by operators. They had to take the bags - weighing up to 25 kg - off the pallet one by one and place them in the machine. Heavy work and prone to mistakes and accidents, as such a bag can easily tear. Moreover, manual handling is not exactly hygienic. So we started looking for a way to automate that step too.”

That did not prove easy. “Because they are such small runs, there are often different types and sizes on one pallet,” says Nick Heuten, manager automation at AZO NV. “They are also stacked at random. To have them de-palletised by a robot, you would have to define every possible size and type of location in a CAD drawing. That is impossible to do. So we started looking for an AI solution. There are many interesting start-ups working on it, but we wanted industrial scalability and quality. So we looked to Siemens, with whom we have worked closely for many years.”

AZO - Jeroen Pieters

About AZO

AZO is a German family business specialising in the automation of bulk handling: receiving, storing, transporting, dosing, mixing and filling bulk goods. It operates in several sectors: batteries, plastics, food and pharma. Worldwide, the company has some 1,200 employees. Belgian subsidiary AZO has some 140.

Our technology for bin picking immediately proved to work well with larger bagged goods.
Jeroen Pieters, Account Manager, Siemens

“With SIMATIC Robot Pick AI, we already have years of experience with AI vision technology,” adds Jeroen Pieters, account manager at Siemens. “Only until now, we mainly used them for bin picking: picking small, irregular objects from bins. I drove with Nick to our production facility in Germany, where we use the picking technology ourselves in the production of our SIMATIC S120 drives, which by the way are also in this machine. We stopped our production for a while and tried with a few bags. The results were immediately promising.”

On to 100% success rate

“Gripping bags is a challenge for a robot, especially if they are laid irregularly on a pallet,” says Nick. “That is usually the case. Even when stacked on a pallet by robots, something always shifts. Bags can be folded or on top of each other, there can be a flap sticking up, creases can prevent the robot from getting a vacuum built up, and so on. As a human being, you can immediately see that something is not lying there properly, for a robot it is much more difficult.”

AZO - Nick Heuten
Human operators immediately see which bag is best to grip. For a robot, that is much more difficult.
Nick Heuten, Automation Manager, AZO

“We set to work and soon achieved an 80% success rate. That is already good, but of course we want to achieve 100%: every bag the robot wants to grab must end up on the machine. Currently, we are at 95%. The system keeps track of which attempts were successful and which were not. We send that data at set intervals to Siemens, which uses it to further improve the algorithm. The entire algorithm runs locally, on a SIMATIC BX-59A. As a result, we don’t need a cloud connection.”

Modular structure

“The nice thing about Siemens technology is that we can use it in a modular way,” Nick continues. “SIMATIC Robot Pick AI ensures the bags are gripped correctly. But next comes a piece of AI technology that we wrote ourselves: LOB Vision. LOB stands for Logistics Operations Bot and determines how the bags are positioned in front of the cutting machine. That software also runs on the BX-59A. That way, we keep that know-how to ourselves.”

Control of the robot is done via the SIMATIC Robot Library. “That is a software library that allows us to control the robot via the PLC. As a result, we do not need to learn a specific robot language. This is a big advantage. Now, due to strict hygiene requirements, we use a hermetically sealed robot from Stäubli. If the next customer wants to process, say, bags of sand, we deploy another robot without much adjustment work.”

AZO - Modular structure

Unique in the market

“This machine has given us a clear edge over the competition, and that entirely with Western European technology,” concludes Corné proudly. “It is thanks to projects like this that we can keep our production here, because operators who still want to do this hard work are becoming rare. With this machine, our customers are assured of hygienic and traceable processing. And thanks to braking energy recovery on the DC circuit, we are also very energy efficient. When one motor brakes and another starts at the same time, the starting motor uses the braking energy. In a system with many starts and stops like ours, that results in big energy savings.”

AZO - Corné Daane
Projects like this allow us to keep our production in Western Europe.
Corné Daane, Sales Branch Manager Vital, AZO nv

The benefits in a nutshell

  • more ergonomics for operators
  • recovery of braking energy by servo drives
  • 100% hygienic processing
  • virtually no product loss
  • perfect traceability

“This could not have been achieved without close cooperation with Siemens - both the Belgian division and the German parent company. In turn, our German colleagues cannot wait to come and see what we have achieved here. It’s great that we can stay ahead like this.”