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.
The challenge
Both applications had to handle many product sizes reliably — picking tubes from cartons without knocking them over, and handling bottles — and, critically, be set up and run by the manufacturer's own operators without a robot programmer on hand.
Our approach
Mobile Automation developed robust, size-adaptive robot programs and, on the bottle line, a fully operator-driven setup so the client is self-sufficient.
Scope of works
- Tube picker: two Universal Robots cobots with vision candidate detection, and a purpose-developed 'calculated' tube-retract that rotates the tool point about a single axis — validated across small, medium and large tubes at speed without collisions
- Flight-trigger sensor mount and refined flights, a start-up check confirming the robots are holding tubes, place-in-pocket behaviour on stop, safeguard-stop integration and reset, and frame bracing for stability at speed
- Bottle line: the setup was rewritten so an operator enters bottle dimensions (height, diameter, count, pick height and rinse requirement) via on-screen pop-ups and the program automatically calculates every pick, place and rinse position
- This removed the need for an engineer or robot-trained electrician to re-teach each product, and added air-rinse safety checks and homing collision-clearance improvements
The results
- Reliable multi-size robotic tube and bottle handling
- Operator-configurable setup — no reprogramming per product
- Vision-guided picking validated across the product range
- Flexible, self-sufficient production lines