Fully Automated Pipette Tip Production in Cleanroom

Initial Situation & Goals

Flex Precision Plastics Solutions is part of the global corporation Flex, which operates with 250,000 employees at over 300 locations worldwide. At the Küssnacht site, the company produces pipette tips under cleanroom conditions (GMP C cleanroom).

The manufacturing of the so-called tips places the highest demands on production. Especially in this case: Within a few seconds, a large number of pipette tips should be relocated, assembled, inspected, and packaged.

In addition to the tight measurement tolerances for the pipette tips, traceability posed a major challenge. Furthermore, the system had to be designed to be as easy to operate as possible and require minimal maintenance and cleaning effort. All with the goal of high overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This also included the automated and autonomous feeding and removal of the pipette tips.

The Solution

For the manufacturing system, we combined seven Stäubli Scara robots and three ACOPOStrak transport systems with laser scanners and Cognex image processing systems. Two autonomous mobile robots from OMRON, in conjunction with a FANUC cobot, take care of the feeding and removal.

The system simultaneously processes two types of pipette tips, which are then packaged together in a rack. The tips are placed on magnetic shuttles from the conveyor belt by a suction gripper. These receive information on which cavity is located in which position and pass through the following stations:

• Bottom-view inspection of the pipette tips
• Filter assembly
• Top-view inspection of the filter position
• Removal of defective parts
• Refilling with good parts
• Transfer to the sales rack

Finally, the sales rack is labeled, checked for completeness, and transported out of the system via the conveyor belt.

The 24-inch touchscreen enables intuitive operation of the system. This, along with clear user guidelines, minimizes operator errors and ensures high machine availability.

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