SMART 2 ( Sandwich Making Autonomous Robotic Technology 2 )

SMART 2 (Sandwich Making Autonomous Robotic Technology) is a milestone project in the transformation of the $500bn industrial ready food business from a low wage, low productivity manual industry to a high tech, high wage, high productivity industry. The ready meal and frozen food industries faces an existential crisis because they can no longer afford or maintain the hundreds of thousands of low cost manual workers that currently deposit the fresh ingredients that go into their products (sandwiches, burgers, pizzas and salads) in the UK, EU and North America.

The industry has been unable to replicate the manual assembly of ingredients because current robotic technology (hardware and software) is unable to recognize, pick and place objects that are porous, deformable, and irregular in size and shape.

Industrial Robotic Solutions has over the last 24 months developed and patented a highly innovative robotic hardware and software solution to this problem called SMART (Sandwich Making Autonomous Robotic Technology) from its food lab at the Innovation Park at the University of Essex. It has developed a gripper that can consistently, hygienically, and delicately pick and place any fresh ingredient (protein, vegetable, fruit, and salad) and using a highly innovative vision system can pick any ingredient from an ingredient bin and place it precisely onto a receptacle, whether a slice of bread, a bun, a wrap or a pizza base.

It has now built and repeatedly tested a 12 robot production line that can fully and automatically assemble sandwiches at the same speed and accuracy as manual operators but at a fraction of the costs with the expectation that manufacturers will be able to achieve significant improvements in productivity and profitability as a result of being untethered to the availability of low cost manual labour

SMART 2 is a collaboration with Around Noon, who are one of the leading manufacturers of sandwiches in the UK who are partnering with IRS in order to test the IRS robot line in their factory in advance of acquiring it themselves and then demonstrating the solution globally to generate sales.