In modern warehousing and logistics, a streamlined workflow is everything… and robotic palletizing is now a go-to technology. With our latest updates, your palletizing can be more efficient than ever.
Palletizing remains one of the most crucial tasks for many businesses. The RoboDK Palletizing Add-in already offers powerful functionality to automate your end of of line operations, helping you easily generate palletizing and depalletizing programs for a range of applications.
At RoboDK, we are always looking for new ways to make your robot programming easier. We recently released 8 updates to our Palletizing Add-in.
Here’s a closer look at robot palletizing and how these new functions will elevate your palletizing workflow…
Why Robot Palletizing Is More Important Than Ever
Robot palletizing has developed from an occasional automation tool to a vital technology across industries. With various industry trends driving more companies to choose robotics, demand is skyrocketing for easy-to-use systems for automated palletizing.
The numbers show a compelling story. According to market research, the global market for palletizing robotics is poised to grow to $2.83 billion in less than a decade.
Some of the most exciting and growing opportunities are those that help companies implement robotics easily, like collaborative robots and intuitive programming tools.
One of the biggest drivers behind this shift is perhaps the sheer flexibility that robotic systems bring compared to traditional alternatives. Compared to manual palletizing or fixed automation robotic systems are easily reprogrammable, making them ideal when your business handles mixed pallets or frequently changing product lines.
The Essentials of Robot Palletizing Programming with RoboDK Add-In
The problem with some robotic palletizing solutions is their lack of flexibility. By locking you into specific robotic hardware, you sacrifice some of the inherent flexibility of robots.
We created the RoboDK Palletizing Add-in to address this issue. It allows you to easily add palletizing to any of the thousands of robot models available in our extensive Robot Library.
The Palletizing Add-in provides many features to streamline layout design, including:
- Real-Time Robot Visualization — As you design your palletizing layouts, you can see a live 3D visualization of the robot performing the task.
- Drag and Drop Layer Design — The intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes palletizing programming as easy as adding images to a presentation slide deck.
- 3D Model Template Importing — You can further streamline your layout design by importing 3D models as templates.
With these features and more, you can quickly and easily create palletizing layouts that would be complex in other tools.
8 Game-Changing Updates to the RoboDK Palletizing Add-In
The latest updates to the RoboDK Palletizing Add-in add a whole new level of ease to programming palletizing and depalletizing.
Here’s what you can expect from these new features and why they matter.
1. Lock Layout
There’s nothing more irritating than perfecting a pallet layer design… only to accidentally knock your carefully arranged boxes out of alignment as you work on another area of the design.
The new Lock Layout button fixes this. With a single click, you can protect your current design, ensuring no items are moved by mistake.
2. Edit Order
Have you ever realized halfway through a pallet design that the box in position 10 should have been in position 2?
Whether you need to swap box placement to improve weight distribution, group similar products, or just create a more visually pleasing palletizing operation, switching box positions is now easier than ever. With just a click, you can switch the positions of two boxes.
3. Rename Layout
Managing multiple palletizing designs can get confusing, especially when your layouts are just called things like “Layout 1”, “Layout 2”, etc.
With the new Rename Layout button, you can now assign clear, meaningful names to each palletizing configuration. With a consistent naming convention, it’s now easier than ever to locate the layout you need.
4. Duplicate Layout
Creating many similar layouts from scratch is a waste of time and resources. Like many users, you are probably working with multiple palletizing layouts that vary only a small amount between them.
With the new Duplicate Layout button, you can now copy any layout immediately. This makes it extremely quick to create a new design based on a similar existing design.
5. Align Objects
Item alignment is critical for ensuring balanced stacking and pallet stability.
The new Align Objects feature is similar to alignment tools you might be familiar with in graphics packages. With a click of a button, you can immediately align your objects by their horizontal or vertical edges and centers.
6. Rotate Objects
Sometimes you need to rotate objects to fit more products onto a single pallet. While it’s already easy to add a new rotated object, sometimes you just want to quickly rotate multiple items.
The Rotate Objects button allows you to rotate single or multiple objects simultaneously by 90 degrees, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
7. Copy-Paste Objects
In palletizing layouts, repetition is a good thing. However, you don’t want to have to repetitively perform the same programming steps.
The new Copy-Paste Objects feature allows for a faster design process by giving you the power to copy and paste multiple items simultaneously.
8. Improved Collision Detection
RoboDK’s collision detection features are already powerful. However, the Palletizing Add-in only had simple collision detection… until now.
The new updates will now ensure that objects in your pallet layout cannot collide with each other. This makes sure that you avoid clashes that could lead to faults in real-world applications.
Getting Started with the RoboDK Palletizing Add-In
Whether you’re using robotic palletizing to solve logistics challenges, improve worker safety, or save valuable time on your production line, RoboDK’s Palletizing Add-In is a must-have tool.
With these updates, it’s now easier than ever to create complex palletizing layouts.
Download the Add-in today today and elevate your operations with the power of advanced robot palletizing
Which new update is most useful for your palletizing? Tell us in the comments below or join the discussion on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or in the RoboDK Forum.. Also, check out our extensive video collection and subscribe to the RoboDK YouTube Channel
