Reuse and recycle is coming back into fashion, and CCL Conveyors had the pleasure of working on a very interesting project supporting such an initiative. Automated Conveyor Systems are becoming more and more commonplace and in this project preowned books utilised conveyors, to be sorted for resale and/or recycled. A large amount of automation was used to support the sortation required in determining what was fit to be resold, or not.
Processes like this, by their nature become very staff heavy, and to keep up with demands and work effectively within often limited warehouse space, some automation is needed.
This project utilised a vision system, guided by an AI learning algorithm, to reduce the need for operators (human intervention) to judge the quality of the books. Human intervention had to be eliminated from this project to a large degree, since what is considered “good quality” can differ from person to person. The goal is for the AI to give a more consistent standard of what is “quality”, thus eliminating a major portion of human error from the system.
One of the main goals of the project was to up the processing speed, by introducing high-speed conveyors and diverters that can work much faster than a person reasonably can, meaning more products can be moved per hour.
The biggest challenge of this project was the incredible range of products that had to be assessed and sorted. The books because of size, dimension, weight and type, excluded many handling methods from the equation ( the system eventually would have to deal with small, big, light and heavy books as well as a variety of shapes and cover materials).
The machinery on this occasion takes a very generalist approach to handling the product, giving ample space and clearance to take up to a very large size of product at high speed.
This project was a particularly interesting one for our team to gather around, and when testing was complete it was fascinating to see the product in full flow, working as expected.
If you have any need for Conveyors to help in your novel, or bespoke project (especially where automation is required), then please get in contact with our sales team!
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