Can tray denesting be automated?

Denesting is the quiet cost in a lot of packaging lines, and it is a genuinely hard picking problem dressed up as an easy one.

Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.

What the job actually is

Somebody separates one tray, cup or lid from a nested stack and places it on a line. Static cling, vacuum lock between nested pieces and thin flexible material all conspire against a clean single pick.

Signs it is worth automating

• Denesting is a dedicated person or a constant interruption to another job.
• You run high volumes of a small number of tray or cup types.
• Doubles are causing downstream jams or quality problems.
• Line speed is limited by how fast someone can denest.

What the cell looks like

A dedicated denester is often the right answer rather than a robot: a mechanical or vacuum denester with an escapement. Where a robot is used, it is usually a fast SCARA or delta with specialized vacuum tooling and a double pick sensor.

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

• You run many tray types with different nesting behavior and no budget to tool for each.
• Volumes are low enough that a person denesting between other tasks is fine.
• Your real problem is a supplier delivering inconsistent stock. Fix the material first.
• You have not tested whether a dedicated denester, which is usually far cheaper, would solve it.

What an engineer has to verify

• Whether a purpose built denester solves this without a robot at all.
• Double pick detection method and what happens downstream when one gets through.
• Material variation between lots, tested on real stock not samples.
• Static control needs in your plant environment.
• Required rate at peak, since denesting is often the fastest motion on the line.

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 Nikolaus Correll et al. (2016), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

  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 Frederic Jacob et al. (2023), Computers & Industrial Engineering
• What are the important technologies for bin picking? Technology analysis of robots in competitions based on a set of performance metrics Masahiro Fujita et al. (2019), Advanced Robotics

  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 Russell J. Allgor et al. (2023), INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics

  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 Hussein Mnyusiwalla et al. (2020), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

  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

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.