Pick-to-Light Kitting Support

Offline kitting has become popular in complex assembly operations and lean manufacturing strategies due to the improvements in system costs, effectiveness, quality and flexibility. Operators working on kitting systems assemble build between one to four kits at a time, often determined by labor costs and system complexity.

Pick-to-lights with multi-colored indication and sensor feedback help ensure the parts are picked from the correct bin and placed in the correct kit. Positive visual guidance indicates what item to pick and ergonomic sensors verify the hand movement. This solution improves quality and throughput.

Banner Engineering’s K50 Optical Pick-to-Light series is a compact, self-contained, three color indicator with integral sensor. Green typically indicates which part to pick, and when the internal sensor detects the hand, the indicator changes to yellow to confirm the task is complete. An optional third message is to display red for a mispick.

The K50 FF100 is a popular, non-contact sensor since the operator’s hand is simply sensed as it interrupts the optical beam. The optical sensing performance is consistent and robust, even when wearing black gloves. The K50 series is available with many variations and custom configurations for color, sensor and logic functions.

Banner’s TL30F series is a low profile, multi-segment LED indicator. If the kitting system is designed for operators to build three kits at a time, then a segmented TL30Fwith three lights is used. The color-coded bins with high grade LED lighting correspond to the three kits to indicate where to place parts for a streamlined part picking process.