For an Australian manufacturer of personal-care and pharmacy products, Mobile Automation delivered Universal Robots automation across two applications — vision-guided tube picking from cartons, and an operator-configurable bottle-handling (BF) line.
Running the cobots without a teach pendant
The tube picker had to be driven entirely by the plant PLC.
- Modbus registers mapped for control and for reading back robot status
- UR Dashboard used for remote start-up
- Proven off site on a demo UR5e running a skeleton program
- Tuned on site until both robots initialised and ran in tandem
Making vision and robot agree on a tube
Camera and robot were referenced to the same grid before any pick was taught.
- Cameras and both robots' reference planes aligned to the vision reference grid
- Camera frame spacer fitted and pick planes recalibrated to hold the whole carton in field of view
- Background check watching whether an arm is inside the camera frame
- Vision trigger timed to keep the frame clear
Picking every tube size cleanly and at speed
Tube exit from the carton is calculated rather than taught size by size.
- Calculated tube-retract rotating the tool centre point about a single axis as each tube exits
- Retract values that scale across sizes, validated on small, medium and large tubes at speed without collisions
- Cycle times optimised by shortening pick-exit and placement travel, with the frame braced
- Start-up check confirming the robots are holding tubes, and a stopped program placing its tube into a conveyor pocket
Handing bottle setup back to operators
Pick, drop-off and rinse positions were replaced with calculated geometry.
- Script deriving every waypoint from five operator inputs: bottle height, diameter, total, pick height and rinse requirement
- Gripper datum redefined and homing moves changed for clearance
- Outfeed gate and drop-off logic rewritten to work without the sensor removed to clear the rinsing motion
The results
- Two Universal Robots applications delivered on the one site
- Tube picking validated across small, medium and large tubes
- Both robots initialise and run in tandem under plant PLC control
- Operators set up each bottle product from five inputs, with no re-teaching