A baking company specializing in large-scale production of cakes had a core requirement to automate the process of picking up double-layered cakes from the production line. These cakes have physical characteristics such as being soft and prone to damage from squeezing, and having a browned crust that is easily scratched. Additionally, the production process must meet food-grade hygiene standards, operate at high speed and continuously, and have low waste. These requirements put traditional automation solutions in a dilemma - manual picking is inefficient and poses hygiene risks, while conventional rigid grippers and vacuum suction cups frequently cause product damage and surface contamination, becoming a key bottleneck for capacity expansion. Based on bionic principles and soft robot technology, SRT's flexible end effector provided a targeted technical solution that enabled the client to achieve "damage-free, efficient, and compliant" automation upgrades.
The Three Core Contradictions of Traditional Solutions
The challenge of picking up cakes is not an isolated case but a common pain point in the automation of fragile pastries in the baking industry. From previous customer demands, the shortcomings of traditional solutions mainly lie in three aspects:
- The contradiction between the damage rate and product value: Rigid grippers rely on mechanical force to hold, and even with repeated adjustments to pressure parameters, it is still difficult to avoid deformation of the cake edges; vacuum suction cups, due to negative pressure adsorption, easily cause surface damage to the cake, directly affecting the product appearance and increasing the defect rate.
- The contradiction between compatibility and production efficiency: Different batches of cakes may have size variations, and traditional fixtures require frequent replacement or parameter adjustment, leading to frequent production line stops and affecting the overall production rhythm; manual picking, although it can reduce damage to a certain extent, still easily causes finger marks, deformation, and even damage, with a defect rate consistently maintained at 3% to 5%, and manual operation is easily affected by fatigue, leading to a decline in picking consistency.
- The dilemma of hygiene and standardization: Personnel contact with products brings potential food safety risks, and manual operation is affected by proficiency, making it difficult to achieve full-process standardization and ensuring quality stability.
The Core Solution of Soft Robot Technology
To address these pain points, SRT's flexible end effector, through material innovation and structural design, has transformed from "rigid grasping" to "flexible adaptation", and its core technical logic is highly compatible with the client's value:
- The gripper body is made of FDA-certified food-grade silicone material, which has an appropriate softness and can simulate human finger-like grasping, distributing the contact area with the cake and avoiding deformation caused by concentrated local pressure.
- It is equipped with an accurate force control system that supports 0.1N-level force adjustment. Even when dealing with double-layered cake stacks, the system can provide sufficient friction and holding force by controlling the gripper's travel and gripping force, ensuring a stable and non-collapsing handling process.
- The bionic multi-finger structure can adapt to the curved surface contours and size variations of cakes without the need to replace mechanical structures. Simple program adjustments can adapt to different shapes and sizes of pastries, such as square and round ones, demonstrating high compatibility and production line scalability, achieving "one gripper for multiple uses" in flexible production.
- The gripper surface is treated with hydrophobic and anti-stick properties, effectively preventing residue adhesion. The cleaning process is simple and convenient, requiring only a regular water rinse, reducing the risk of cross-contamination.
- It can be quickly adapted to the client's existing robotic arm system, shortening the integration cycle and ensuring the rapid resumption of efficient production line operation, meeting the client's continuous production needs.
Value in Data
After the project implementation, the company's production line achieved significant improvements in multiple dimensions:
- The defect rate of products dropped significantly: from about 3% to 5% during manual operation to below 0.5%, significantly improving product qualification rates and appearance consistency. - Continuous and stable production efficiency: The production rate has been increased from approximately 40-50 pieces per minute with manual labor to a stable rate of over 55 pieces per minute, representing a 60% efficiency improvement and effectively breaking through the production capacity bottleneck.
- Unmanned operation achieved: Each shift saves 1-2 workers, reducing labor costs while completely solving the pain points of "difficult recruitment and slow training".
- Standardized production system established: Fully automated operation throughout the process eliminates human intervention, ensuring consistent quality and meeting the non-contact production requirements of the food safety system.
In the process of automation in the food industry, the implementation method of the basic action of "grasping" directly affects the efficiency, cost, and quality of the entire production line. In this case, the soft robot technology successfully solved the problem of automated cake grasping. Its core advantage - based on bionics as the underlying logic, through flexible contact, adaptive compatibility, and precise force control, it solves the pain points of automated grasping of fragile, irregular, and high-hygiene-demand products, and has strong universality, which can be widely applied in various scenarios of grasping and handling of fragile, irregular, and soft foods, such as bread, biscuits, chocolate, fruits, etc.
This solution embodies the product logic of "starting from the scene and empowering with technology", providing customers with sustainable and scalable automation value through replicable and adjustable technical modules.
