Gripper for yogurt cups

For Optipack Sachsen GmbH, a subsidiary of Müllermilch, cup production needed to be automated. The company produces up to 5,400 cups per minute on three thermoforming machines. That amounts to 1.9 billion cups per year.

The overall solution consists of 16 robot grippers. Robots take the cups from the thermoforming machines and package these "white cups" in boxes. Before being imprinted, these are unpacked, then repackaged. In doing so, two different cup sizes had to be taken into account: During removal from the thermoforming machine, a specially developed cavity gripper grips a block of cups. Another gripper then removes these cups row by row and inserts them into boxes. An additional gripper is capable of removing these cups from the box and feeding them to a printing machine.