ABB Robots in Truck Unloading and Palletizing

For most of the last century, a truck backed up to a warehouse dock was unloaded by hand. Crews lifted boxes off the trailer floor one at a time, wheeled them inside and stacked them on wooden pallets. The work was heavy and repetitive, and the loading dock was where a lot of back injuries happened.

Unloading a truck at a grocery warehouse in Washington, D.C., 1942. Photo: Marjory Collins / Library of Congress (public domain)

Forklifts and pallets sped things up after the Second World War, but only for freight that arrived already stacked. Parcels and floor-loaded containers, with boxes packed wall to wall and no pallet underneath, still needed people. Many docks still work that way, on city streets and at big distribution centers alike.

Workers unloading a delivery truck by hand in Shibuya, Tokyo. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robots took over the far end of the job first, building the pallets. ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 are four-axis palletizing robots. The IRB 460 can run up to 2,190 cycles an hour, and the IRB 660 reaches 3.15 meters, which is far enough for one arm to serve two conveyor lines.

An ABB palletizing robot's gripper lifting cases at a Nestlé plant in Brazil. Photo: ABB

Now robots are climbing into the trailer too. UPS has ordered 400 trailer-unloading robots from Pickle Robot in a deal worth about $120 million, with deployments starting late this year. Lidl is rolling out 22 of Boston Dynamics' Stretch robots at its import warehouses. Their cameras pick out each box in a messy wall of freight.

Trucks backed up to the loading docks at a Pennsylvania food bank warehouse. Photo: USDA (public domain)

ABB arms fit in right after that handoff. Cases coming off an unloading robot's conveyor can go to an IRB 660 with a vacuum gripper, and the whole cell can be laid out and tested first in ABB's RobotStudio simulation software. At one Dot's Pretzels plant, a single IRB 660 builds pallets for two packing lines at once.

An ABB IRB 660 building a pallet of cases at Dot's Pretzels. Photo: ABB

I expect the next step to be a single cell that unloads a trailer and re-sorts the boxes by store order in one pass. Upstream, ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots already pack products into cases at high speed. Connect the two and a box could travel from packing line to store shelf without a person lifting it. Home deliveries could follow later, at a smaller scale.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing bags into cases. Photo: ABB

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