The use of robotic palletizing systems has been increasing in the so-called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. However, because of the type of solutions developed, focused on high performance and efficiency, the degree of adaptability of packaging solutions from one type of product to another is extremely low. This is a relevant problem, since companies are changing their production processes from low variety / high volume to high variety / low volume. This environment requires companies to perform the setup of their robots more frequently, which has been leading to the need to use offline programming tools that decrease the required robot stop time. This work addresses these problems and, in this paper, is described the solution proposed for the automated offline development of collision free robot programs for palletizing applications.

The increase in productivity is a demand for modern industries that need to be competitive in the actual business scenario. To face these challenges, companies are increasingly using robotic systems for end-of-line production tasks, such as wrapping and palletizing, as a mean to enhance the production line efficiency and products traceability, allowing human operators to be moved to more added value operations. Despite this increasing use of robotic systems, these equipments still present some inconveniences regarding the programming procedure, as the time required for its execution does not meet the current industrial needs. To face this drawback, offline robot programming methods are gaining great visibility, as their flexibility and programming speed allows companies to face the need of successive changes in the production line set-up. However, even with a great number of robots and simulators that are available in market, the efforts to support several robot brands in one software did not reach the needs of engineers. Therefore, this paper proposes a translation library named AdaptPack Studio Translator, which is capable to export proprietary codes for the ABB, Fanuc, Kuka, and Yaskawa robot brands, after their offline programming has been performed in the Visual Components software. The results presented in this paper are evaluated in simulated and real scenarios.

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