The following is a press release we received from Tramar. We don’t have much to add to it, other than to look at the video on the bartalks website where it shows the robot in action.
It’s actually pretty cool, and although I am anthropomorphising the robot, I like how it seems to take a second after it stacks each bag to admire its work.
We made some minor edits to the official press release to make the English version read better, but haven’t changed the material of the message.
Tramar SRC from Le Havre France, is a logistics company that unloads green coffee from containers and can store up to 160,000 bags of coffee beans. They handle about 50,000 MT of green coffee annually.
In 2019, Tramar was facing difficulties finding people to unload their containers manually. To mitigate the labour shortage problem, Tramar purchased an automatic container unloader & palletizer, from Copal Handling Systems of The Netherlands. Since June 2020, this machine has been in operation to the full satisfaction of Laurent Gouédard, director of Tramar SRC.
Labour shortage however is not diminishing, to the contrary, it has been increasing year after year. Mid 2021, Laurent Gouédard went to Copal again to find a solution for re-stacking coffee bags from large harbour pallets, to smaller euro ones.
In February 2022, Copal commissioned an automatic re-palletizing robot at Tramar. An advanced camera system recognizes the position of each individual bag and sends its coordinates to the robot. The bags can therefore be accurately picked up and re stacked, on a different pallet size.
Different coffee bags on one pallet is possible as well. The Copal re-palletizing robot will make mixed pallets with no effort at all. Instead of 3 people, plus a forklift driver to re-palletize, one forklift driver is now enough to get the job done.
