Printing – Processes – Condition responsive
Patent
1998-03-12
1999-08-03
Yan, Ren
Printing
Processes
Condition responsive
101483, 101486, 101 43, 901 27, B41F 1724, B25J 1802
Patent
active
059310987
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to a mechanism and method, notably to a robot mounted label applicator, print head or scanning device and its use in applying labels or printing images onto a substrate or in scanning or reading a feature on the surface of a substrate, such as a planar face of a product or on a pallet load of articles.
Ink jet, hot foil and other printers are used to mark alphanumeric, quality control characters or other images on a wide range of substrates. In the packaging of products, it is commonplace to group together groups of a product on a pallet and to form a unitary load by shrink wrapping those products in place upon the pallet for transport and storage. However, it is desirable to apply a printed label or the like to the unitary load so as to identify the products on that particular pallet and their destination. This is commonly done be applying a suitable bar code or other image to the label using an ink jet printer, hot foil or other printer, and then applying that pre-printed label to the pallet. However, due to mis-identification of the pallet and its contents by an operator, the label may be incorrectly printed or the correctly printed label may be applied to the wrong pallet. Furthermore, problems subsequently arise in the scanning of manually applied labels due to the variation in position and orientation of the labels upon the pallet.
In order to reduce the errors due to manual application of the label and its information, it would be desirable to apply the information to a label already carried by the pallet or to apply a specific pre-printed label to the pallet and to control the information printed on that label by means of a computer which can be interlinked with means identifying the products carried by that specific pallet and its destination.
Problems are encountered with such a concept in that the position of the label on the pallet can vary, for example due to manual mis-placement of the label or movement of the label with any shrink-wrapping of the plastic film to which the label has been applied, and creasing or distortion of the label may occur during placement upon the pallet. These problems can be reduced where the products are of uniform size and shape and the shrink wrapped pallet present a consistent shape and size of face to the label applicator mechanism. However, where the pallet and/or the product is not uniformly shaped and sized, variations in the position of the label give rise to problems which have as yet not been solved. As a result, it has not proved practical to print information, for example bar codes, onto blank labels which have been pre-applied to a pallet load of products or other substrate whose shape can vary from one product item to the succeeding item.
Where the information is applied to a blank label which it then applied to the product or pallet, it is necessary to apply that label accurately to enable subsequent scanning of that label to be carried out mechanically. Similar problems to those encountered with printing onto a blank pre-applied label arise.
The above problems are accentuated where pallets or products of different sizes and shapes succeeding one another on a packaging line are to be labelled and no cost-effective method has yet been devised to achieve this.
We have now devised a method and device by which such printing of pre-applied labels can be achieved despite changes in the position of the label upon the pallet or by which a label can be applied to an accurately determined position on the pallet enabling that label to be scanned by conventional means in its subsequent transport and storage. The invention makes it possible to apply labels carrying a large amount of information to a moving pallet in a product/packaging line so that an individual pallet carrying a range of products can be traced throughout its transport and storage. This makes it possible to organise the transport, storage and identification of that pallet using computers, thus substantially eliminating human error.
The invention can also be applied to
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patent: 3463329 (1969-08-01), Gartner
patent: 4092204 (1978-05-01), Wesley
patent: 4115684 (1978-09-01), Linbom
patent: 4745857 (1988-05-01), Putnam et al.
patent: 4844947 (1989-07-01), Kasner et al.
patent: 5221405 (1993-06-01), Trouteaud
Colilla Daniel J.
Gunter Jr. Charles D.
Willett International Limited
Yan Ren
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