Artificial Intelligence Brings New Capabilities to Robotic Depalletizing

Depalletizing is a common manufacturing operation that has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years due to a variety of industrial labor issues, ranging from a shortage of available workers to efforts to reduce risk of worker injuries. To help address these issues around depalletizing operations, Honeywell has introduced its Smart Flexible Depalletizer, which uses artificial intelligence to ease the implementation of robotic depalletizing technologies and minimize the need for manual labor to break down pallet loads. Honeywell's vision and perception technologies are used to guide the depalletizer's robotic arm, allowing cases to be picked from a single- or mixed-SKU pallet in fixed or mobile locations. The company's computer vision technology identifies the location of every case on the pallet, while its artificial intelligence-driven perception software automatically recognizes a variety of packaging formats. Honeywell's new Smart Flexible Depalletizer in action at PACK EXPO Las Vegas 2021, showing how it can depalletize unorganized pallets.The machine learning and motion planning used in the Smart Flexible Depalletizer optimize the movements of the robotic arm to ensure maximum picking speed.