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Robots in the tobacco industry
It is estimated that in Italy, in the food & beverage and tobacco sector alone, there are just over 7,000 robots at work, a hundred less than in Germany (third in the world rankings after North America and China).
After recalling that 38% of the companies interviewed use the robot in packaging applications and that 31% specifically in palletizing, Gruosso (Giambattista Gruosso, professor of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano) reported that 75% of companies have declared a close relationship between robotics and artificial intelligence and to be continuously searching for new AI algorithms.
In particular, there is a lot of experience in robotization of tobacco production. At the international conference Robo Business 2023 the experience of tobacco factories will be revealed. Below is a non-exhaustive list of announced presentations at the conference.
Heavy C-48 tobacco boxes are now lifted by a robot
The tobacco industry is still one of the largest sectors of the Russian economy. RTF LCC is a Russian tobacco manufacturer. Recently installed a robotic system to produce cut rag tobacco material. Stable and reliable automation systems are needed to meet the demand for cigarette production.
Tobacco boxes, for the most part, are completely crumpled. This makes developing a safe automation system a challenge. Handling cartons with a forklift is very rough and time-consuming.
A giant Fanuc with a 700 kg lifting capacity and a grip the size of a cabinet easily picks up damaged boxes from the feeding conveyor and gently hands them over to the operator. The safest way to open cartons is still in the hands of the human operator.
Collaboration between robots and humans does not only exist in the laboratory. With seriously designed and properly implemented precautions, large industrial robots can also work together with humans. Thus, robot strength and human dexterity can be combined to create the perfect technological process.
Scandinavian Tobacco Group
The world’s largest factory for pipe tobacco production, Scandinavian Tobacco Group, wanted to spare its employees from having to make back-breaking repeated movements.
The robot has taken over the handling of lids for tobacco tins in the tobacco packing process – a task that was previously performed by hand. 1 or 2 people have been freed from this specific process thanks to the robotic arms and are now able to carry out other tasks at the factory. As a result the expenditure on temporary employees has been reduced.
A robot packs cigarettes
Chinese industrial robotics company Siasun has developed a new system for packing cigarettes which can cope with the ever-changing shapes and dimensions of tobacco products and packaging.
Vision-based agricultural robots in tobacco growing
Experimental evaluation of the system is performed in tobacco fields via a four-wheeled mobile robot sprayer controlled using a computer equipped with NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU. The results demonstrate that Faster R-CNN and YOLOv5-based vision systems can analyze plants at 10 and 16 frames per second (fps) with a classification accuracy of 98% and 94%, respectively. Moreover, the precise smart application of pesticides with the proposed system offered a 52% reduction in pesticide usage by spotting the targets only, i.e., tobacco plants.
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Conference Proceedings
If you wish to order a copy of the RoboBusiness 2023 conference proceedings, please click HERE.
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