Flexible automation solutions for today’s bakeries

Abstract

Discusses process automation in bakery manufacturing. States that although automation has occurred in the preparation and process areas, packaging has remained a manual operation. Presents a flexible automated packaging system which can cope with the demanding variables encountered when dealing with bakery products. © TechniStar Corporation

Garras con sensores táctiles intrínsecos para manipular alimentos con robots

“…El uso de robots con la ventaja del contacto directo con el producto puede permitir la posibilidad de incorporar sensores capaces de evaluar parámetros de calidad en frutas y verduras como puede ser la firmeza. La automatización y la robótica están ya presentes en algunas operaciones de la industria alimentaria (Ruiz-Altisent et al 2010;Chua et al 2003;Kusuda 2010), en el área de pastelería y dulces (Wallin 1997;Tallian & Weinstein 1998), carne (Holmes 2010;Zhou et al 2007), y pescado (Buckingham et al 1996), quedando mucho trabajo por hacer en el sector agroalimentario, especialmente en el caso de productos delicados en los que la manipulación manual es mayoritaria y aún no se han podido llevar con éxito la manipulación directa del producto con robots. Las soluciones a los problemas de mecanización agrícola con robots son de carácter multidisciplinario.…”

A geometric modelling approach to virtual package design

“…Later on in the 1970s, plastic came into the packaging world in a big way, resulting in PET bottles and plastic moulds for packages. With increasing pressure from the marketing sector and later on from the envorinmentalists [5,8], the packaging industry saw a lot of research and innovation in the area of alternate packaging materials and automation in the packaging processes [32]. Today the industry stands such that there exist specialized packaging consulting firms that claim to provide high-quality packaging solutions to meet the industry demands and catch customers' attention.…”

“…Strict conditions imposed by the environmentalists have forced packaging industries to come up with •alternate eco-friendly means of packaging [5,8]. Literature has examples of techniques like shrink-wrapping, flexible automated packaging [20,22,32], case-ready packaging [30], and retail-ready packaging that have been developed and used to obtain easy and inexpensive means of packaging a variety of products. Of late, holograms have been used in packaging to attract younger customers as also to prevent product counterfeiting [15].…”

“…Of late, holograms have been used in packaging to attract younger customers as also to prevent product counterfeiting [15]. There are firms today that automate the packaging processes [28,32] and yet more firms that manufacture the machines that are capable of doing such a thing.…”

“…The planes offset along their normals discussed earlier, we investigated three possible techniques to blend the offset between the polygons [13,32,33]. These techniques have been discussed in more detail below.…”