Osterburken - On 22/11/2023 in Stuttgart, the members of the AZO GmbH & Co KG management team, Lukas Zimmermann and Daniel Auerhammer, proudly accepted the "Allianz 4.0 Award" from the state of Baden-Württemberg and the VDMA.
Outstanding individual Industry 4.0 solutions were honoured in the "Winner" category. The factors of market relevance and the degree of innovation of the solution played a key role. After a thorough examination by the jury, a total of 27 companies were honoured for outstanding achievements in the areas of digitalisation and digital transformation.
AZO has hit the bull's eye with its AI-based depalletising system. "Manually loading raw materials from sacks is physically strenuous, prone to errors and poses a risk to both the product and the operator, especially when handling critical or sensitive raw materials. For this reason, we have developed a system that performs this task fully automatically. For efficient, consistent production and the highest product quality: AZO's automatic bag depalletising system," explains Daniel Auerhammer.
Bags on a stack of bags are automatically detected by an intelligent 3D AI camera system, position data is transmitted to a vacuum gripper and the bags are lifted onto a bag emptying station without manual intervention. There they are opened, emptied and disposed of via a baling press: all in one compact system.
"And if sacks are not automatically detected by the system, the operating personnel can trace them manually and thus generate training data for the AI in order to gradually increase precision and efficiency," says Steffen Günter, Head of Research and Development, who played a key role in developing the system with his team.
The award received and the continuous further development of the portfolio and the Osterburken site show that we are well positioned for the future.