Why Leverage Automatic Loading?
No matter the industry, customers are always looking for more product variety, utility, and innovative solutions to fit their needs. Producers must now rethink their packaging processes and overall strategies to keep up with modern demand and foster real, scalable growth to stay competitive.
Product loading and placement determine how effectively products enter a package or packaging-machine infeed. Products may need to be identified, inspected, oriented, grouped, tracked, and placed into thermoformed cavities, trays, flow-wrapper infeeds, cartons, cases, or other defined positions.
Harpak-ULMA combines product handling, vision, robotics, controls, and packaging-machine synchronization to reduce repetitive manual loading and improve throughput, placement consistency, sanitation, and package presentation.
Contact Our Sales Team
{"PostalCode":{"display_mode":"hide","fire_action":"All","file_types":"png","logic_data":[{"cfef_logic_field_id":"StateRegion","cfef_logic_field_is":"!=","cfef_logic_compare_value":"CA","_id":"d06f159"}]}}
Automated Feeding, Orientation, and Placement
- Automated loading into thermoformers, tray sealers, flow wrappers, cartons, and cases
- Vision-guided identification, tracking, orientation, and placement
- High-speed robotic loading for random or organized product flow
- Static, tracking, single-lane, multi-lane, and grouped-loading approaches
- Hygienic solutions for food and washdown environments
- Integration with product distribution, inspection, packaging, and downstream automation
Distribution Vs. Loading
Product distribution prepares the flow by balancing lanes, spacing products, forming rows, or routing product to the correct destination. Loading takes the prepared product and places it into the package, cavity, tray, wrapper infeed, carton, or case.
A successful loading project should evaluate both steps so the robot or mechanical loader receives product in a form it can handle consistently.
Core Capabilities
Product Detection and Vision Guidance
– Identify product position, orientation, presence, spacing, count, and other application-specific characteristics.
High-Speed Delta Robotics
– Track products in motion and place individual items or groups into packaging equipment at high rates.
Structured Loading Systems
– Use multi-axis, Cartesian, or gantry robotics as well as mechanical, race-track collation, or other controlled-motion approaches for organized products and repeatable placement patterns.
Application-Specific Tooling
– Select gripping, vacuum, mechanical, soft, or product-support methods based on product shape, surface, fragility, sanitation, and handling sensitivity.
Packaging-Machine Synchronization
– Coordinate the loading system with machine speed, index, tray or cavity position, wrapper pitch, product availability, faults, and changeovers.
Loading Applications
Thermoformer and Tray Sealer Loading
Place products from above into defined cavities or trays between the forming, denesting, loading, and sealing operations. Vision, sensors, robotics, and application-specific end-of-arm tooling can support organized or dynamically tracked product.
Flow Wrapper Loading
Orient, group, space, and place products into wrapper infeeds at the pitch required for single packs, multipacks, stacked products, or continuous product chains.
Vertical Packaging Feeding and Loading
Coordinate product elevation, dosing, multihead weighing, discharge, and bagger timing based on the product and package requirement.
Secondary Packaging Loading
Group and load finished packages into cartons, corrugated cases, reusable containers, master bags, or other distribution units.
Automation that Scales with You
Our robotic solutions utilize a shared controller architecture and remote I/O are designed to scale. That means each additional cell adds capacity, not complexity. One HMI. One network. One system that grows with your production.
A single robot cell can become two, four, etc., without redesigning the control architecture. Shared infrastructure means the marginal cost of each new cell drops as you scale, and minimizes learning curves.
Designed Around Your Product
Fresh, frozen, sticky, delicate, irregular, stacked, or randomly presented products require different loading strategies. The correct solution also depends on throughput, package format, sanitation, inspection, changeover, and floor-space requirements.
The objective is not to place a robot beside the line. It is to create a controlled product path that allows the packaging operation to run more consistently.
Complete with Allen Bradley Controls, Built-In.
Complete with Allen Bradley Controls
Our robotic cells run on Allen-Bradley Logix, the same control platform already running your packaging line.
The robot, infeed, and packaging machine share one controller, one HMI, and one recipe environment. Your maintenance team already knows it, and your support calls go to one place.
Coordinated motion, shared recipes, and unified OEE data turn isolated machines into a completely integrated system.
Robotics Videos
Connect with a Robotics Expert Today
{"PostalCode":{"display_mode":"hide","fire_action":"All","file_types":"png","logic_data":[{"cfef_logic_field_id":"StateRegion","cfef_logic_field_is":"!=","cfef_logic_compare_value":"CA","_id":"d06f159"}]}}
Looking to learn more? Get a comprehensive breakdown of automation with our eBook:
More Advantages of Automatic Loading
Harpak-ULMA offers product-to-pallet automatic loading and unloading solutions that can enhance volume, throughput, and quality output and save you more facility space for both the infeeding and outfeeding stages. By automating everything from product allocation to insertion, you have a quick, safe, hygienic loading and unloading process that eliminates damage to the product. In addition to improved safety, hygiene, and efficiency, automatic loading and unloading offer other benefits as well for your modern packaging operations:
Extra (Improved) Quality Control: Previously, Quality Control (QA) was left to human workers over the course of an 8-hour shift. Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed that process, working tirelessly beyond a human worker’s average day and catching up to 100% of errors or defects.
Improved Production Speed: Automated systems can multi-task tedious or menial jobs faster with better packaging consistency and output at almost every stage of the packaging process than the average human employee. Tasks like sealing and labeling become automatic and other tasks that require human interaction – shipping, receiving, and product styling – can be attended to by your trained staff.
Enhanced Ergonomics and Lower Risk of Employee Injury, Error, Fatigue: Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) – injuries of muscles, nerves and joints – account for more than one-third of all workplace injuries. By allowing automated loading and unloading machinery to perform more tedious tasks, you can prevent injuries and fatigue and achieve better consistency and productivity at almost every stage of your process.
Improved Information Access: Integrating automated turnkey solutions for your packaging strategy can give you better access to processing data and analytics, as well as essential information concerning Human Machine Interface (HMI). HMIs make your machines more user-friendly and cut down on training costs, improving your process and making your production operations more streamlined and profitable.
Advanced Rockwell Automation: Every one of our smart, connected packaging platforms utilizes innovative Rockwell Automation’s Integrated Architecture to reduce solution complexity and maintenance costs and realize better quality, capacity, and throughput. We focus on lowering your total cost of ownership and offering the most reliable systems available while addressing all your packaging issues.