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Robotic Palletizing and Machine Tending
Take the lifting off your people and keep product moving to the dock.
Palletizing sized to your line
End-of-line palletizing is a rate problem before it is a robot problem. We start with your numbers: cases per minute at peak, case weights and dimensions, pallet spec, and how many SKUs run down the same line. The robot gets picked to match those numbers, not the other way around.
Pallet patterns matter more than most quotes admit. Interlocked patterns hold loads together on rough trailer rides. Column stacks maximize cube for stable product. Labels-out patterns keep warehouse scanning fast. A good cell stores every pattern as a recipe, so a new SKU is a data entry, not a service call. Floor space decides the rest, and there is more than one way to lay out a cell:
- In-line cells behind the case sealer, with a single pick point and powered pallet handling.
- Dual-station cells where the robot builds one pallet while a forklift swaps the other, so the line never waits.
- Compact cells that use area scanners instead of hard fencing when floor space is tight.
Tending for CNC, presses, and molding
Machine tending is the same discipline pointed at a different bottleneck. A robot loads and unloads a CNC lathe or machining centre, confirms part seating with air blow-off checks, and triggers cycle start over discrete I/O or EtherNet/IP. Raw stock comes in on trays, drawers, or infeed conveyors. Finished parts go to gauging, deburring, or packout.
Press tending covers stamping and brake presses, where the press controls and interlocks carry most of the safety work and the robot does the reaching. For injection moulding we work with the Euromap 67 robot interface most moulding machines already carry, handling sprue picking, insert loading, and part packout.
We are honest about unattended running. Lights-out tending depends on chip control, tool life monitoring, and enough raw stock staged for the shift. We design cells around those limits instead of pretending they do not exist.
The gripper decides the cell
Most palletizing and tending failures trace back to end-of-arm tooling, not the robot. A robot arm is a mature product. The tooling is where your product’s quirks live: cases that bulge, bags that sag, machined parts covered in coolant.
Selection comes first. Vacuum plate tools handle sealed cases quickly. Foam-plate vacuum picks shrink bundles and trays with open flaps. Clamp and fork grippers carry bags and pails that vacuum cannot hold. For machine tending, two-jaw and three-jaw pneumatic grippers with part-present sensing are the workhorses, often doubled up so the robot swaps a finished part for a blank in one visit.
When a catalogue tool does not fit, we design and build custom tooling: combination heads that pick cases, slip sheets, and empty pallets without a tool change, or fixtures built to your part. Every tool ships with drawings and a spares list.
Integrated with the plant, not bolted on
A palletizing cell that ignores the rest of the line just moves the bottleneck. We wire the cell into what you already own: infeed conveyors, case sealers, checkweighers, stretch wrappers, and the plant PLC.
The handshakes are plain and documented. Pallet complete, wrapper ready, downstream full, upstream starved. Newer equipment talks over EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, or Modbus TCP. Older machines get hardwired I/O, and safety circuits stay hardwired regardless. We program five PLC platforms, Allen-Bradley, Schneider, Omron, Phoenix Contact, and Unitronics, in IEC 61131-3 languages your maintenance team can read, ladder logic included.
Control panels are built and tested in our own panel shop before they reach your floor. HMI fault messages are written in plain language so a night-shift operator can clear a jam without calling anyone.
One team from concept to support
Robotic cells usually involve four companies: an integrator, a panel builder, an electrical contractor, and whoever wrote the PLC code. When the cell faults at 2 a.m., each one points at the other three.
Bedford runs this work as one team. Engineering is in-house, with a B.Eng on staff, and the same group carries the project from concept through simulation, panel build, robot and PLC programming, installation, and support. Panels come out of our own shop. Red Seal industrial electricians do the installation. The people who wrote your cell logic are the people you reach when you call 1-833-423-3367.
For palletizing and tending, that continuity matters after startup. A new SKU, a new pallet pattern, a fixture change on the CNC: the team that built the cell makes the change, instead of a stranger re-quoting someone else’s work.
Built for the Maritimes plants
This region runs on seafood, forestry, and food manufacturing, and all three are heavy on exactly the jobs robots do well: stacking frozen blocks and cases in cold rooms, handling lumber and panel products, packing out food lines. We have people across the Maritimes and serve Halifax, Truro, Amherst, Moncton, Saint John, and Charlottetown by road, not by airport.
The labour case is usually stronger here than the speed case. Manual palletizing means repetitive lifting, often at awkward heights and often in the cold, and back and shoulder injuries are a recognized cost of that work. Plants that automate the stacking rarely cut heads. They move people to inspection, machine operation, and shipping, the jobs they have been struggling to fill.
We will not quote you someone else’s results. Bring your line rates, your injury log, and your overtime numbers, and we will build the payback math on your data. The sizing questionnaire asks for products, case weights, line rate, pallet spec, and floor space, and it is the fastest route to a real budget number.
Common questions
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Get a cell concept
The sizing questionnaire takes a few minutes, the cell concept and budget estimate cost nothing, and nobody calls unless you ask.