An application of collaborative robots in a food production facility

Despite the food industry being a leading sector of the European economy, the level of penetration of automation is still low. The main reasons lie on the small margin of food items which does not encourage technological investments, the extremely spread vendors market i.e. mostly small and medium enterprises, and the high level of flexibility and care required to handle food products along production, packaging, and storage operations. Nevertheless, the advent of collaborative, small and flexible robots provides great opportunities for the design and development of new effective processes integrating the human flexibility with the efficiency of automation. This paper explores the impact of adopting collaborative robots in the food catering industry, by illustrating a case study developed for the end-of-line of a catering production system. A generalizable methodology is proposed to support the study of the technical and economic feasibility of the implementation of such technology. This methodology is intended to support managers of the food industry to analyse the constraints that limit the automation of a process and to measure the expected performance of the system in terms of throughput, ergonomics and economic benefits resulting from the adoption of collaborative robots.