Labeling on glass containers of various shapes such as red wine bottles and essential oil bottles has been a "tough nut to crack" for many factories. Manual labeling is not only inefficient, but also can cause scratches or even breakage on the bottle body if not handled with care. Last year, we tailored a flexible positioning labeling production line for a high-end fruit wine brand in Zhejiang, successfully reducing the labeling breakage rate from the industry average of 3% to below 0.5%. Today, let's take a look at the technological breakthroughs behind this set of robot flexible positioning labeling system.
When traditional manual labor meets special-shaped glass bottles
When we first walked into the customer's filling workshop, the scene in front of us made us worried: workers need to hold the 750ml curved red wine bottle with both hands, aligning the labeling position and controlling the pressing force. Even experienced workers can only label 200 bottles per hour, and there are often bubbles and wrinkles on the bottle mouth and bottle shoulder. What's more difficult is that they produce 6 types of bottles at the same time, and they have to retrain operators every time they switch products. "Last year, the bottle loss in the labeling process alone was enough to buy a semi-automatic equipment." This statement from the production supervisor made us realize the urgency of flexible positioning labeling technology.
Equip the robot with "tactile nerves"
The hard flaw of traditional mechanical positioning labeling machines is that they are "stubborn" - the bottle shape and placement angle must be strictly limited. Our solution is to equip the robot with three sensing systems:
360° visual positioning: Through the combination of ring fill light + high-speed camera, the highest curvature point of the bottle and the labeling area can be captured within 0.1 seconds
Pressure feedback suction cup: Automatically adjust the adsorption force according to the thickness of the bottle wall, even 0.8mm ultra-thin perfume bottles can be grasped steadily
Dynamic correction module: At the moment when the labeling roller touches the bottle body, the label direction is fine-tuned in real time to ensure that it can fit even on the wavy surface
The most surprising thing about this flexible positioning labeling system is its "gentleness" towards glass containers. Just like the hand-eye coordination of senior labelers, the robot can avoid stress concentration areas through the flexible swing of the six-axis joints while applying the necessary pressure.
"Transformers" on the production line
To achieve mixed-line production of multiple bottle types, the flexible positioning labeling system must break through the bottleneck of rapid changeover. Our engineers developed a dual-channel memory library:
Physical layer: Use a quick-change suction cup group. When changing the bottle type, you only need to rotate and switch the gripper module.
Data layer: Preset 100+ bottle type parameters. The corresponding labeling solution is automatically called after the barcode scanner reads the work order.
Last Christmas season, the customer urgently added a batch of limited edition wine bottles with embossed patterns. The production line that originally required 2 days of debugging, with the help of the adaptive learning function of the flexible positioning labeling system, completed the switch from cylindrical bottles to polyhedral bottles in only 4 hours, and the labeling qualification rate remained above 99% throughout the process.
From single-point breakthrough to whole-line empowerment
This set of flexible positioning labeling technology brings more than just optimization of the labeling process. Due to the realization of zero-contact handling of the bottle body, the customer took the opportunity to upgrade the automation process of the filling and capping process. Now their production line can handle 8 containers of different capacities and materials at the same time, and the average monthly loss cost is reduced by 67%. As the customer lamented during acceptance: "This is not just a piece of equipment, but it opens up the ceiling of customized production for us."
