Gibotech is sending a robot to Norway

Odense-based Gibotech is making inroads into the Norwegian market with an automation solution for Norwegian fish processing plants.

Employees at one of Norway’s major fish processing plants are now receiving assistance from Denmark as Odense-based Gibotech enters the Norwegian market. This is happening through a palletizing system for the fishing industry, which is currently being implemented.

It was an inquiry from a machine builder that supplies equipment to Norwegian fish processing plants that sparked the Danish-Norwegian collaboration to develop a robotic cell designed to improve working conditions and reduce absenteeism in the fishing industry.

New recommendations on heavy lifting are intended to improve working conditions

At the factory in western Norway, bags of frozen fish used to be handled manually when they needed to be emptied, and with bags weighing between 25 and 75 kg, moving the heavy bags was a real strain on the employees. Such physical strain increases the risk of both illness and workplace injuries among employees. At the same time, the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority does not recommend lifting more than 25 kg at a time, and even if employees lift the heaviest blocks in pairs, this would still exceed that recommendation. Factory management therefore wanted to automate repetitive, one-sided tasks to improve the work environment for employees, reduce absenteeism due to illness, and comply with general recommendations regarding heavy lifting.

- In addition to optimizing production, management also wanted to ensure that employees had the best possible conditions for performing their tasks. “We therefore needed to find a way to minimize repetitive movements and create a better work environment, so that the factory could also comply with current recommendations,” says Mikkel Bjerregaard, CSO at Gibotech.

Say goodbye to both heavy lifting and trash

The task, therefore, was to develop a solution in which a robot would move and unload the bags of frozen fish, thereby sparing the employees from having to do so much heavy lifting every day.

The solution was a robotic system that lifts the bags onto a tilting platform, where they are cut open and removed by a robot. Conveyor belts then transport the frozen fish blocks to a thawing tank. This spares employees from heavy lifting while increasing efficiency and improving competitiveness.

- From the very beginning, this has been an exciting project in which the employer has prioritized the work environment. There can be many reasons for choosing to incorporate robots into production, but in this case, it made perfect sense to improve employees’ working conditions and eliminate some of the most physically demanding processes, says Mikkel Bjerregaard, who also expects the process to become more predictable in terms of both speed and capacity.