Automated Robotic Food Manufacturing System

Traditional soup, sauces and other liquid based product manufacturing utilises large fixed cooking kettles (500 to 3000Kg) requiring pumped and manual handling transfer systems for moving ingredients and finished product from process to process. Consequently, this leads to prolonged manufacturing times, variable product quality, considerable waste and high energy usage. Olympus Automation Ltd (OAL) intends to address these issues through developing a fully integrated automated robotic food manufacturing system. With the help of an Innovate UK grant, OAL and the University of Lincoln (UoL) will design and develop the technically difficult and innovative robotics control and materials handling systems. It will incorporate the development of a semi-automonous system that combines state of the art cooking and materials handling technologies with automated robotic ingredient loading, utilising vessels up to 1000Kgs. 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 will be located and tested in a dedicated food processing hall at UoL’s National Centre for Food Manufacturing at Holbeach.