Ultra-fast sorting line for rolls of woven carpet

Customer’s request

Due to an increasing demand for fast, small deliveries for e-commerce, our customer was looking for a system to fully automatically remove a number of rolls of woven carpet from a container and distribute them back to as many as 40 containers.

Here we also had to keep the following specifications in mind:

• Carpet rolls vary widely: lengths from 0.6 to 3 m, weights between 0.7 and 40 kg and diameters from 50 mm to 350 mm!
• Requested rate: 4 carpets/min
• It was important to the customer that the carpets that were part of the order and the remaining carpets were stacked neatly in a container
• We were also requested to make the sorting and stacking robot as compact and as low as possible so that an additional storage area could be built above the installation

Our realisation

With this design, we provided the following components:

• A chain conveyor transports the containers to be handled to a tilting unit
• The carpets are separated and brought individually to an automatic or manual scanning system through conveyor belts
• Once the destination is known, the rolls are moved to 1 of the 2 stacking robots. 2x3 carpets can be prepared per robot in the middle of the walkway of 1 robot
• The servo-controlled trolley of each stacking robot is fitted with 3 electric grippers that pick up the 3 prepared carpets in one go. Each time the robot's moving trolley passes above a destination container for a roll, 1 of the 3 arms lowers and places the carpet in the container

By taking 3 carpets each per movement of the trolley, we were able to considerably increase the sorting rate. Moreover, we were able to keep the height very limited by providing the vertical movement with a scissor guide combined with a wound lifting strap.