40 n MACHINE VISION April 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com Vision system helps to automate vaccine production E cient production and logistics is important in vaccine production. Large production capacities have to be produced rapidly to deal with viruses, so automation is vital. At one stage in the process, robots place vials lled with vaccine – also known as injectable ampoules – from a conveyor belt into drawers and then remove them again later. A German company, Goldfuß Engineering, which specialises in robotic loading systems for packaging machines and laboratory automation, has developed a concept consisting of several trolleys with drawers, robot cells, and conveyor systems. It worked with another German rm, Simon IBV, which developed an optical 3D system that allows the robot to grasp the vials without any damage. The trolleys, each holding around 10,000 vials, act as a bu er and transfer system between lling, quality control, and packaging processes. Siegfried Hameln, a contract manufacturer of pharmaceutical ingredients and nished products, was commissioned by a vaccine developer to produce an active ingredient.. In turn, Siegried commissioned Goldfuß to develop the automated process for bu ering vials. Bavaria-based Simon IBV was brought on board to provide the vision component for the robot cell. “This kind of automation solution has never been available before,” says Stephan Trunk from Goldfuß Engineering. “In comparable applications, the vials are loaded manually into trays or boxes after lling, stacked manually onto pallets or in Kanban trolleys, and subsequently depalletised again. This means that several employees are usually tied up with non-value-added activities. The new, automated process speeds things up, in part because employees can focus on more demanding tasks.” The trolleys have nine drawers, with each drawer holding 24 rows of 46 vials. In total, therefore, a trolley can hold almost 10,000 vials. By bu ering such a large quantity, it is possible to use the packaging system exibly. The trolleys allow random samples to be removed easily and fed back into the packaging process after quality assurance approval. Because the trolleys are mobile, they can be parked in cooling chambers so that the cold chain is not interrupted. Employees position the trolleys by hand, so their exact position can vary. In addition, the weight of the trolleys and thus the position of the drawers changes constantly during loading and unloading. One challenge was to cope with the di erent positions in which the trolleys could be positioned, while ensuring that the robots can work autonomously. To maintain the required positional accuracy so that the vials are always grasped correctly, the exact position for each row needs to be recalculated constantly. In an almost fully automated process, this task can only be accomplished using a 3D machine vision system. Sensors were not suitable because they would require several scanning positions, making it impossible to achieve the required number of cycles. Another possible alternative – using a 2D camera on the gripper – would also be problematic because, as well as the extra weight, it would also be necessary to lay sensitive cables that could withstand the robot’s movements over a long term. “The 3D cameras with a working distance of approximately 120cm to the top drawer and 180cm to the bottom drawer are extremely precise and still o er the robot a su cient working range for collision-free handling,” explains Daniel Simon, who is responsible for technical sales at Simon IBV. “In combination with powerful machine vision software, however, it has been possible to meet all the requirements for this application.” As well as the robot, the hardware components of the cell include highresolution 3D cameras using a stereometric method with pattern projection, and an industrial computer with fast processors for PC-based evaluation. MVTec’s Halcon vision system was chosen. Two positions An employee rst pushes a trolley with the vials into one of two possible positions. A 3D camera in the robot cell pinpoints the trolley and checks whether its drawers are open or closed. The PLC contains information on whether the trolley being processed is to be loaded or unloaded, which drawer to open, and how many vials are there and their locations. The 3D camera takes a picture of the Two German companies have developed a robot-based system for loading and unloading trolleys with vaccine vials. Machine vision allows the robots to work autonomously. Trolleys, each holding around 10,000 vials of vaccine, act as a buer and transfer system between lling, quality control, and packaging processes. Robots move the vials from a conveyor belt into the drawers, and later remove them.
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