The manual packaging of products with variable shapes remains one of the persistent challenges in the food industry. You often face the difficult choice between labour-intensive processes, which bring both ergonomic risks and inconsistencies, or automation pathways that do not always offer the necessary flexibility. At the same time, the pressure to produce more efficiently, sustainably, and safely is increasing.
Within the Smart Farming & Food Processing Project Biobakkerij De Trog, AMTRA, Fontys, and Flanders Make have joined forces to provide an answer to this. Together, they have developed a prototype for the flexible insertion and automatic packaging of bread rolls – a solution that demonstrates how robotics, vision, and AI can concretely address the needs of a modern food environment. During this seminar, you will discover how the collaboration came about, which technological choices were made, and how the test setup functions in practice. Furthermore, you will have the opportunity to see the demonstrator in action live.
Programme
- Introduction, situation report and problem statement – Biobakkerij De Trog
- Challenges in manual packaging: shape variation, speed and ergonomics
- Impact on production efficiency and the strategic need for automation
- Process and collaboration between the partners
- Embedding in the Smart Farming & Food Processing track
- How organisations with diverse backgrounds arrived at a shared innovation
- Cast, iterative development and the importance of co-creation
- Technical choices and development of the robot setup - AMTRA
- Design, construction and validation of the prototype
- Integration of mechanics, vision, and automation platform
- Modularity and real-time control
- Gripper solutions for elongated rolls – Fontys
- Technology for grasping shape-variable products
- Proof of concept with two robots and physical demonstration of grippers
- AI Quality Control and Camera Vision – Flanders Make
- Vision infrastructure for inline quality control
- Application of AI for classification and model training
- Live demonstration at AMTRA
- Full test setup in action: scanning, picking and packing
- Explanation of technical choices made
- Demonstration of the physical grippers
- Panel discussion: reflection and valorisation
- Test results, business case, and willingness to invest
- Opportunities for valorisation within the broader food industry
- Future steps: implementation, scaling up, or further optimisation
- Questions from the audience
In this seminar, you will learn how multidisciplinary collaboration leads to a working prototype for flexible packaging. You will discover which technical choices were decisive and what insights this yields for the broader food industry. Additionally, you will gain inspiration for how robotics and AI can be implemented within your own processes.
Don't miss this unique opportunity to experience a working innovation up close and engage with the experts involved.
Practical
13:30 Reception at AMTRA
14:00 Start of the presentation
16:30 Conclusion and Q&A
