MHS and Mujin Exhibit Robotic Palletizing at PACK EXPO Las Vegas

At PACK EXPO 2021 in Las Vegas, MHS, a single-source provider of material handling automation and software, demonstrates a robotic palletizing solution developed in collaboration with Mujin, a specialist in advanced motion planning for industrial robot arms. The palletizer, engineered for a U.S.-based packaging producer, is showcased at the Mujin booth #SU7233 in the South Upper Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The palletizing robot can reportedly handle four different SKUs of the same case size simultaneously, picking cases individually from the source conveyor and stacking them onto one of four pallet destinations at a rate of 120 cases per hour with more than 99.95 percent accuracy. The system is capable of double pallet stacking, in which after finishing one pallet, it locates, picks and places a slip sheet and empty pallet over the completed pallet. Once the second pallet stack is full, an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) moves it to the shrink-wrap section.

The solution leverages the combined strengths of Mujin and MHS for everything from solution development to implementation, including robotic end-of-arm tooling, vision, controls, assembly, installation, integration and validation. MHS also supplied the source conveyor and AMR, as well as MHS Helix, a modular warehouse execution system (WES), which integrates the automated components with the customer’s business-level systems to work together as a smart system.

“Intense labor challenges and customer expectations are testing manufacturers and distributors to re-think manual processes and capitalize on the potential of automation to unlock greater reliability and efficiency,” said Dean Terrell, senior vice president, research and development, MHS. “With this project, MHS Robotics partnered with Mujin to do what we always do – meet real-word challenges with advanced automated solutions that our customers can be confident in.”

A previous collaboration between MHS and Mujin produced a multi-pick robotic end effector for an e-commerce order fulfillment project that won a 2021 RBR50 Innovation Award from Robotics Business Review. Unlike end effectors that handle a single item at a time, the multi-pick end effector can pick up and hold as many as 36 items simultaneously and pack four orders at a time into four separate shipping boxes.

For more information, visit https://www.mhsglobal.com.