June 1, 2011, Clear Automation announced its 100 parts per minute label applicator system, designed to handle the application of labels to liquid cosmetic bottles. The system features a Fanuc robot, Herma labeler and a graphical touch-screen human machine interface (HMI). This system allows a manufacturer to apply labels at various stations along the travel of the indexer. A label is applied, a batch code is laser etched and the batch code is vision inspected for readability and accuracy at a speed of 100 parts per minute. Bottles travel to the cell along a conveyor, upright in pucks.
The pucks are fed into the cell by a servo-driven screw that spreads them to match the pitch of a linear indexer. A robot picks them from the pucks and lays them horizontally onto the indexer. Bottles that fail the inspection are ejected from the indexer into a bin. Good bottles are ejected onto a conveyor to travel downstream to packaging.