Robotic System for Depalletization of Pharmaceutical Products

Abstract

Management of pharmaceutical products is one of the most complicated and labor-intensive issues in hospitals. The complication can lead to a number of serious problems, especially medication errors that affect the treatment process of patient. The management is involved various logistics activities from obtaining products from external suppliers to dispensing to patients. A number of attempts have been made to implement robotics and automation to these processes in order to improve accuracy and performance. In this research, a robot system used to manage the product at the stage before medicine dispensing. Automatic dispensers’ magazines need to be refilled with the products, e.g. medicine boxes. In general, the transportation of medicine from suppliers are in the form of packing case with a lot of boxes inside. In this case, SCARA robot with a vacuum gripper is used to depalletize boxes contained in the packing cases and rearrange them into magazines for further dispensing. The robot is equipped with vision system, so that the system is capable of handling variations of box packaging in term of appearance, size, and placement pattern. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been applied to locate and classify the boxes and the system can treat them properly.