Can picking parts off a moving conveyor be automated?
Tracking a moving belt is well proven technology. Whether it pays depends almost entirely on how the parts arrive on that belt.
Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.
What the job actually is
Product flows down a conveyor and somebody picks it off into a box, tray or second line. At speed this is a fatiguing, high repetition job with real strain risk.
Signs it is worth automating
- Somebody picks off a belt continuously and rate limits the line.
- Products arrive separated rather than touching or overlapping.
- The product is rigid enough for consistent vacuum or finger picking.
- Rates are high enough that labor is meaningful.
What the cell looks like
A delta or SCARA for high rate light work, or a collaborative arm for moderate rates, with a camera and encoder tracking the belt. Deltas are the standard answer above roughly 60 picks a minute. Note that delta specifications are published as working envelope diameter, not reach.
This is one job inside a bigger family. The pick and place guide covers the equipment classes, the cost ranges, and the disqualifiers for all of it.
When the answer is no
Read this part first
We would rather talk you out of a bad purchase than into one. If any of these describe your version of this job, the honest answer is probably not yet.
- Product arrives touching, overlapping or in clumps, so vision cannot segment it reliably.
- Rate is low enough that a person handles it between other work.
- Your product is fragile or variable enough that tooling would need constant change.
- Belt speed varies and there is no encoder feedback available.
What an engineer has to verify
- How separated products are on the belt, observed at real production speed.
- Peak picks per minute, not the average.
- Encoder availability and conveyor speed stability.
- Product variation, including damaged or partial pieces and what the cell does with them.
- Reject and recovery handling when a pick misses.
Safety is not on that list because it is not ours to determine. Cell design, guarding and the risk assessment belong to an independent certified integrator, every time.
What the research says
Peer reviewed work from our research library on this application. These are studies of other plants and other settings, not a prediction about yours, and the excerpts are the authors' own words. Every title links to the source so you can check us.
- Analysis and Observations From the First Amazon Picking Challenge
From the abstract: “This paper presents an overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams.”
- Picking with a robot colleague: A systematic literature review and evaluation of technology acceptance in human-robot collaborative warehouses
- What are the important technologies for bin picking? Technology analysis of robots in competitions based on a set of performance metrics
From the abstract: “Bin picking is still a challenge in robotics, as patent in recent robot competitions.”
- Algorithm for Robotic Picking in Amazon Fulfillment Centers Enables Humans and Robots to Work Together Effectively
From the abstract: “This paper describes how Amazon redesigned the robotic picking algorithm used in Amazon Robotics (AR) fulfillment centers (FCs) to enable humans and robots to work together effectively.”
- A Bin-Picking Benchmark for Systematic Evaluation of Robotic Pick-and-Place Systems
From the abstract: “Pick-and-place operations constitute the majority of today's industrial robotic applications.”
The full pick and place, kitting and bin picking shelf has 14 works.
Someone has already done this
Roaming cobot stacks trays and picks conveyor parts at a 54 person molder
At AIM Processing in Colorado, a worker sat at the palletizing station and every 90 seconds moved a tray into position for a cartesian robot, spending only a couple of seconds actu...
Aerospace shop doubles glue cell output and cuts scrap from 15 percent to 3 percent
Tool Gauge in Tacoma, Washington ran an assembly where operators picked end caps for a plastic extruded panel and dispensed glue into a channel so narrow that the shop was seeing h...
See it run
Two clips of this job actually running, from two different manufacturers. Both are the makers' own marketing footage, showing a cell under good conditions with a part it was set up for, so watch them for what the motion looks like rather than as evidence of what your rate would be.
A camera finds parts lying in random directions on a running conveyor and the robot picks them at about 75 a minute into a tray.
A robot hung upside down over the work area picks parts up and sets them down in a fast repeating cycle.
Is your version of this job automatable?
Tell Joe what you are running: a candid preliminary read, including when the answer is no.
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