Robotic Flexible Food Manufacturing System (RFFMS)

Traditional soup, sauces and other liquid based product manufacturing often depends on electronic and / or paper based control systems whilst using large stationary cooking kettles (500 to 3000Kg) requiring pipe and manual handling transfer systems for moving ingredients and finished product from process to process. Consequently, this leads to variable product quality and results in considerable waste and high energy usage. Olympus Automation Ltd (OAL) intends to address these costly issues through developing a robotic flexible food manufacturing system with fully integrated digitised process control. With the help of an Innovate UK grant OAL and its project partners, will design and develop the technically difficult and innovative software and hardware systems required to achieve the project’s overall objective. The food manufacturing will incorporate the development of OAL’s highly innovative APRIL (Automated Processing Robotic Ingredient Loading) system that combines state of the art cooking and materials handling technologies with automated robotic ingredient loading, utilising smaller 750Kg vessels. The integrated system will produce higher quality food with unprecedented flexibility, more consistently and faster with greatly reduced ingredient wastage and energy costs, whilst taking up to 50% less factory space. The system and testing will be located in a dedicated food processing hall at the University of Lincoln’s National Centre for Food Manufacturing at Holbeach.