Autonomous pharmaceutical - packaging serializer on a conveyor belt with pick & place aggregation system

Abstract

The pharmaceutical supply chain in Zimbabwe and abroad is wrought with unscrupulous traders who have flooded the medical market with illegal, tampered and falsely labelled counterfeit drugs. The risk posed by these products has proved to be fatal to patients in recent years; and this is only the beginning of the problem. The local generic pharmaceutical industry has been dealt a huge blow due to the open boarder trading and excessive importation of falsified medicines into the country. It is due to the incessant notoriety of this issue that the global pharmaceutical community has finally resorted to implementing the Global Serialization, Aggregation and Traceability directive. All pharmaceutical companies in the participating countries will be required by law to serialize a Unique Identification Code (UID) on generic medical products no latter than 2019. This serialization UID is to be printed either at primary, secondary or tetiary packaging level, and must be authenticated (Tracked and Traced) by Automated Identification Data Capture Technology (AIDC) scanners at all points of the supply chain, especially the dispensing stage. This research demonstrated the automatic conveyance, serialization and palletization of pharmaceutical cartons on a tertiary level packaging line as a panacea to the illicit drug trafficking that has taken the world by storm. The autonomous nature of this project was aimed at vastly improving upon the prevalent manual practices in industry today. Conclusively, caron units were successifully conveyed, serialized and palletized. The average output of the device was 1 carton per 48.105 seconds.