Mixed Case Palletizing with Industrial Robots

The automated building of customer order pallets in a retail, food or beverage distribution center is still a challenging and complex task. Over the past 15 years many companies have tried to develop different solutions to tackle this labor intensive job. In this article a detailed overview of existing implementations will be presented and compared with the development results of the activities from KUKA, Grenzebach and Swisslog under the leadership of the author of this paper. The final paper will contain examples of the two global soft drink producers in the world and a short overview of the current development project from Swisslog at the German drugstore chain dm.