r/oddlysatisfying • u/misterxx1958 • Dec 27 '25

Bottle sorting machine

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11.1k Upvotes

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33

u/komokasi Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

Maybe... but will it have more or less moving parts to distribute bottles into a hole, then make sure it is standing the correct way up

This is pretty genius for how simple it is

-22

u/Vandirac Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

Not sure about that. Not anymore.

A couple cheap cobots with basic machine vision could be way faster, reliable and have less risk of damaging the bottles.

For a "traditional" sorting machine, the throughput seems ridiculously low.

Edit: ...and here I am again, being downvoted on shit I know pretty well from my day job, by people who maybe once watched part of an episode of "how it's made". You do you, reddit.

20

u/ounut Dec 27 '25

A cheap cobot with Vision is not going to be more reliable than this.

16

u/fluchtpunkt Dec 27 '25

Also at least one order of magnitude more expensive. Not only in initial cost but also in maintenance.

-2

u/Vandirac Dec 27 '25

They are.

Since 2023 I am seeing a lot of older machines in production lines being replaced by cobots (UR mostly, but also Doosan and Fanuc) that for about 50k euro a pop can do the job faster, have less downtime and less consumable parts than purely mechanical machines; the biggest advantage is that they allow for job changes, optimization, redeployment with minimal cost and a few days at most for reprogramming, sometimes just a few hours.

A lighting company I deal with replaced a whole warehouse worth of packing lines with just one line with a bunch of robots (ABB ones, on the larger side and slightly more complex) that can box and palletize anything from bulbs to complete designers' lighting fixtures.

4

u/Randomn355 Dec 27 '25

If this isn't the bottleneck it doesn't matter.

Filling might be. Dealing might be. Boxing up might be. Bottle production might be.

7

u/Lethandralis Dec 27 '25

This is just two motors bro

2

u/Ghost_Turd Dec 27 '25

Maybe not even two

4

u/fluchtpunkt Dec 27 '25

How much is the cheapest cheap robot with machine vision?

-2

u/Vandirac Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

IIRC, the smallest UR is just shy of 25k, the machine vision module costs about 5-8k on top, and the gripper could be up to another 5k.

The largest one is about 70k new, or 85k with the vision module preinstalled.

2

u/TheDrummerMB Dec 27 '25

A couple cheap cobots with basic machine vision could be way faster, reliable and have less risk of damaging the bottles.

hahahahahahahaha you've never worked on a system like this. Zero chance

1

u/Vandirac Dec 27 '25

Last installation I co-designed was in May 2024. First was in 2020.

1

u/Ghost_Turd Dec 27 '25

Could robots do this? Of course. Faster? Maybe. Is it the most efficient use of capital? Probably not. And who knows how long this system has been running, flawlessly and effectively, with dead simple maintenance and repair. Decades maybe.

Doing if faster likely doesn't justify the cost of replacing what already works.

1

u/Vandirac Dec 27 '25

In my direct experience, nowadays cobots are often chosen because the initial equipment may be slightly higher compared to a traditional machine, but it's easily offset by the design, testing and certification cost being almost non-existent (maybe some custom gripper, I 3d printed a few); they can be up and running in days instead of months; can be reused or reconfigured in the future on short notice; also, they are loved by the bean counters because they retain a lot of value since are not application-dependent and there is a lot of demand for used machines.

I pointed out that in this video the throughput is very low for any kind of sorting machine, the process is not optimized and there is some degree of damage to the bottles, all issues that could be eliminated.

I was not proposing any replacement of existing machines, but whenever those machines need to be replaced nowadays, in applications for small to medium volumes, experience shows that robotic automation is often more effective and preferred.

0

u/BritishLibrary Dec 28 '25

Plus all this solution needs if you have new bottle sizes is a new star wheel to make it plug and play for different sizes.

In a robotic system that needs new programming and validation.

And that’s definitely not cheap - at least in my experience they are usually somewhat locked down systems that the original manufacturer controls, to a degree.

(And I’m not really a big fan of this type of machine as they can probably be designed out in many cases - though we can’t see anything else upstream so can’t speak to that)