NISTIR 7866 

Next Generation Packaging, 

Kitting, and Palletizing: 

Can one robot do it all? 

Raj Madhavan 

Stephen Balakirsky 

Craig Schlenoff 

http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7866 
 

NISTIR 7866 

Next Generation Packaging, 

Kitting, and Palletizing: 

Can one robot do it all? 

Raj Madhavan 

Stephen Balakirsky 

Craig Schlenoff 

Intelligent Systems Division 

Engineering Laboratory 

National Institute of Standards and Technology 

http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7866 

June 2012 

U.S. Department of Commerce 

Rebecca Blank, Acting Secretary 

National Institute of Standards and Technology 

Patrick D. Gallagher, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director 
                                                            

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: 

Can one robot do it all? 

R. Madhavan, S. Balakirsky, and C. Schlenoff 

Executive Summary 

In the material handling community, three disparate subgroups exist in the areas of kitting, 

packaging, and palletizing. Currently, these operations are performed by a mix of automated and 

manual systems with very limited market penetration of automated systems into small- and midsized companies. Lack of automation is due to difficulties in using today’s generation of robots 

for tasks that include requirements such as small lot sizes and product variability. In addition, 

infrastructure requirements and high levels of required expertise make them prohibitively 

expensive. A major contributing factor is that current manufacturing robots have little or no 

understanding of the world around them and no capability to dynamically change their actions if 

the environment or task changes. This restricts them to operate in highly constrained 

environments and makes it difficult to change from one task to another. 

A seminar titled “Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all?” 

was held on February 9th 2012 at the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA) MODEX 

show in Atlanta, GA. The seminar primarily focused on whether systems that are capable of 

modifying their behavior by generating and adapting plans will overcome the aforementioned 

limitations and if these systems will require detailed knowledge of and a consistent 

representation for both the manufacturing environment and the plans. The seminar also explored 

ways to exploit the significant similarities in packaging, kitting, and palletizing in the way their 

requirements are represented, and in how their performance is evaluated. 

The seminar was attended by over twenty end-users, robot vendors, system integrators, and 

researchers. It consisted of six talks by speakers from industry and the National Institute of 

Standards and Technology (NIST), followed by a general discussion. The group discussed how 

to collaborate, with industry participants from all sectors soliciting NIST’s leadership in 

developing a data representation to describe product handling for packaging, kitting, and 

palletizing. The participants recognized that there is a large overlap in the technologies needed 

for packaging, kitting, and palletizing, and decided to set up an informal working group that will 

use mailing lists to identify issues to address jointly. A subset of the participants also agreed to 

act as an industry advisory panel for a NIST project that is addressing these issues. 

This document1

 reports on the issues discussed at the workshop and next steps. 

1

Certain commercial equipment, instruments, or materials are identified in this document. Such identification does not imply 

recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology nor does it imply that the products 

identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose. 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all? 
 

                                                            

1. Introduction 

Researchers from the Intelligent Systems Division (ISD) of the National Institute of Standards 

and Technology (NIST) brought together vendors, integrators, and end-users to participate in a 

half-day seminar on February 9th 2012 at the MODEX show held in Atlanta. The primary focus 

of the seminar was to explore material handling with respect to kitting, packaging, and 

palletizing in order to find areas of common interest where resources may be combined to 

provide impact to the overall industry. 

The half-day seminar consisted of an introductory talk by NIST followed by talks from three 

vendors, one integrator, and one end-user with over twenty attendees representing various 

communities from industry, academia, and government. An open discussion concluded the 

seminar during which the participants and the speakers discussed existing gaps, easily achievable 

short-term goals, long-term wish lists, and the steps required to close the existing gap between 

these communities. A subset of the participants also agreed to act as an industry advisory panel 

for a NIST project on Intelligent Planning and Modeling for Autonomous Systems2

 that is 

addressing these issues. 

2. Goals and Motivation 

Currently, material handling infrastructure associated with manufacturing and assembly 

operations is a mix of automated and manual systems with very limited market penetration of 

automated systems into small- and mid-sized companies. Lack of automation is due to 

difficulties in using today’s generation of robots for tasks that include requirements such as small 

lot sizes and product variability. In addition, infrastructure requirements and high levels of 

required expertise make them prohibitively expensive. A major contributing factor is that current 

manufacturing robots have little or no understanding of the world around them and no capability 

to dynamically change their actions if the environment or task changes. This restricts them to 

operate in highly constrained environments and makes it difficult to change from one task to 

another. NIST believes that systems that are capable of modifying their behavior by generating 

and adapting plans will overcome these limitations and that these systems will require detailed 

knowledge of and a consistent representation for both the manufacturing environment and the 

plans. 

In the material handling community, three disparate subgroups exist in the areas of kitting, 

packaging, and palletizing. There are, however, significant similarities in these tasks, in the way 

their requirements are represented, and in how their performance is evaluated. This seminar 

explored these similarities and looked for ways in which common representations and automated 

planning systems can be developed to enhance performance and simplify setup and execution. 

The desired long-term end results are next generation material handling systems and the 

measurement science and standards for planning and modeling. The resulting systems will be 

flexible enough for use in a wide range of applications. 

2

http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/ps/intellplanmodautosys.cfm 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all? 
                                                            

3. Summary of the Talks 

The following is a summary of the key points from the talks delivered by the invited speakers: 

 Title: Intelligent Planning and Modeling for Autonomous Systems 

Stephen Balakirsky of NIST provided an overview of a recently embarked project within 

NIST that is developing measurement science and standards to enable advancements in 

the autonomous decision-making of robots through application to specific scenarios 

relevant to manufacturing. The ability to create and execute plans in real-world scenarios 

is what separates a machine-tool from an intelligent manufacturing system. Plans enable 

a robot to change its actions to deal with uncertainty in its environment and to rapidly 

switch to new tasks. These plans are based on models of the current environment, 

predictions about the future, and a priori knowledge of causal relationships between 

current actions and results. He argued that the breadth and usability of knowledge in 

these models is one of the main factors that constrains the flexibility and performance of 

manufacturing planning systems. There is currently no accepted standardized way to 

represent this knowledge, to reason with this knowledge, or to measure the performance 

of these systems. 

 Title: Meeting the Challenges of Mixed Case Palletizing in Production 

Larry Sweet of Symbotic (a new supply chain automation division of end-user C&S 

Wholesale Grocers) shared his company’s experience in case picking and palletizing. In 

the conventional case picking operations at C&S, they employ voice-pick systems that 

allows each employee to handle close to 150 cases an hour, with warehouses handling 

approximately a million cases per week or more. He remarked that in a typical grocery 

supply chain only one-sixth of the cost is associated with the raw material and production 

of the product, most of which is largely automated already. The remainder is largely 

labor, workers comp, and transportation, which provides the greatest opportunity for 

automation. As for the use of robots in these operations, a layer picking robot breaks 

down single Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) or layer rainbow pallets, and using appropriate 

procedures, the cases are then stored and retrieved in the right sequence for building a 

mixed pallet. He gave examples from the beverage and grocery industries of the 

challenges involved in building, handling, and grouping pallets due to the fact that even 

within the same SKU there may be products of different dimensions, variations in height, 

“bulging”, etc. Within these applications, the robots run from 5 second to 6 second cycle 

times3

 and place products onto a pallet. Larry also discussed the differences between 

packaging, kitting, and palletizing from the system/customer, and SKU perspectives. 

 Title: One Robot CAN Do It All 

David Peters of Universal Robotics, Inc, as an integrator, was the only speaker who 

suggested that one robot can in fact do it all! David then went on to describe the 

philosophy behind the development of their product which is rooted in techniques from 

Artificial Intelligence. It uses sensor information to update the knowledge required for 

3

The Adept Cycle Time is defined as the time it takes a robot tool to perform continuous path, straight-line motions of 25 mm up, 

305 mm over, 25 mm down, and back along the same path. 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all? 
 

handling tasks across different applications such as random box moving, mixed 

palletizing, bin picking, and box picking. Universal Robotics develops device 

independent controls with their Autonomy product that supports collision avoidance and 

auto inverse kinematic determination. 

 Title: Pick, Pack, Pallet: Can one robot do it all? 

Erik Nieves of Yaskawa America, Inc., Motoman Robotics Division, presented a 

taxonomy of packaging robots and showed that kitting is a subset of bin picking. He 

proceeded to elaborate on how packing and palletizing are also subsets and that bin 

picking can be thought of as the superset from which the other three can be deduced. Erik 

argued that “one robot should not do it all” and in fact one robot should deal with going 

from unstructured to structured, one to create cases, and one to create pallets. He also 

stressed the need for a standard robot language and that the success of such a language 

depends on a ubiquitous and well defined vocabulary. 

 Title: Exploiting Robotic Flexibility: Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities 

Dick Motley of Fanuc Robotics listed a series of successes in various application areas 

and his views on why and how the successes have been possible. He also described 

challenges and opportunities in these areas. In summary, he identified product 

proliferation, short product life cycle, small batch runs, regulatory influences, and labor 

issues as the areas that require attention and capital cost, change-over time, portability, 

and future flexibility as the perceived barriers. 

 Title: Automated Robot Order Assembly 

Christian Wurll of KUKA Systems North America discussed KUKA’s experiences in 

terms of robotic applications for material handling and mixed case palletizing 

applications. In addition to kitting, packing, and palletizing, he noted yet another similar 

task that can be added to this list: assembly tasks. Christian argued that, in spite of 

similarities, one robot cannot do it all due to varying demands on payloads, reachability, 

packaging types, speeds, and component costs. He outlined how these similar tasks can 

be carried out by employing a modular software framework and provided several 

example scenarios where KUKA has had success using their AuROrA (Automated Robot 

Order Assembly) framework. In addition to modular software and control concepts, he 

also emphasized the importance of standardized communication interfaces, flexible 

planning approaches, and easy programming and configuration capabilities. 

4. Can one robot do it all? 

With the exception of one speaker, the consensus among the attendees was that one robot 

should not and cannot do it all. This is due to the differences in items such as payloads, 

reach, and grasping requirements. Based on discussions, we suggest the following definitions 

for kitting, packaging, and palletizing: 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all? 
4.1 Definitions 

	 Kitting is the process by which individually separate but related items are grouped, 

packaged, and supplied together as one unit. For example, automobile manufacturers 

typically make multiple versions of a vehicle on the same assembly line. Each vehicle 

may have different options, trim designs, etc. Frequently, these items are assembled into 

a kit and delivered to the assembly line for workers to integrate onto each individual 

vehicle. 

	 Packaging can be thought of as a set of processes (such as cleaning, drying, and 

preserving) and materials (such as glass, metal, paper or paperboard, plastic) employed to 

contain, handle, protect, and/or transport an article. The role of packaging is broadening 

and may include functions such as to attract attention, assist in promotion, provide 

machine identification (barcodes, etc.), impart essential or additional information, and 

help in utilization. 

	 Palletizing can be defined as the methodology of storing and transporting goods stacked 

on a pallet, and shipped as a unit load. It permits standardized ways of handling loads 

with common mechanical equipment such as fork-lift trucks. 

5. Next Steps and Future Considerations 

An open discussion was held towards the end of the seminar to discuss what areas can be 

targeted both from short-term and long-term perspectives. The hour-long discussion 

retouched on several points raised by the presenters and in the ensuing discussions. Below is 

a summary of the key points: 

5.1 Symbiotic role of Integrators and End-users 

The attendees stressed the need for seamless transition between robots and humans. One of 

the speakers suggested that a robot is the appropriate one for a particular task when that robot 

can be taken out of the line and a human can take over the robot-assigned task. Such 

seamless transition requires the system integrator to be aware of such requirements and be 

able to accommodate these needs. Towards this end, the attendees strongly felt that the robot 

system integrator community needs to grow to serve small and medium sized manufacturers. 

The robot integrator should also be able to combine disparate technologies to meet the needs 

of the end-user. Another suggestion that came up was to foster the idea of seeing the role of 

integrators as service providers who can empower the end-users who provide the necessary 

requirements to achieve desired solutions. 

There was also wide agreement on coming up with a different business model for packing, 

picking, and palletizing tasks where the existing models do not hold. It was suggested that 

the thinking needs to change in terms of putting robots on the expense side of the ledger (like 

labor) instead of on the capital equipment side. The lack of robotics expertise of people who 

work and cooperate with the robots was also cited as an area requiring further training and 

corrective steps. 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all? 
 

5.2 Standardization and Performance Metrics 

In general, the group lamented the fact that so many vendors neither use particular standards nor 

conform to existing best practices. Though it is a challenging task to come up with a common 

standard for various purposes, the group agreed on the following as a good initial set of questions 

for which the community (vendors, end-users, integrators, academia, and NIST) should seek 

answers: 

 How can existing systems be evaluated and tested?
 

 What performance measures and test methods are appropriate? 

 Can a common representation be developed for world, plan, and execution knowledge? 

 How can we standardize control software across different platforms?
 

 Can we ensure PackML compliance across platforms? 

 Can robots (end effector, conveyor, etc.) themselves be standardized? 

 How can we reduce dependency on robot programming? 

 How can standardized communication interfaces and flexible planning approaches be 

developed? 

 Can we agree upon a common robot language and what are the steps that need to be 

taken? (One suggestion was to form a committee to address robot language standards). 

In particular, the attendees emphasized the role NIST can play in the following areas: 

	 Development of a uniform representation (standard) of data associated with the products. 

For instance, can we match SKUs with characteristics of packaging wherein the SKU 

would contain the dimensions, etc.? 

 Development of performance metrics for robot capability 

 Development of standards for describing robot capability 

 Development of performance metrics for end effectors and vision systems 

 Quantification of the actuation time of end-effectors 

 Development of generic process control 

	 Development of an open source protocol 

A Google group titled nextgen_RobPKP (groups.google.com/group/nextgen_robpkp?hl=en) has 

been setup to facilitate discussions between the interested members of the community. To join or 

to post a message to the group, send an email to <nextgen_robpkp@googlegroups.com>. 

Next Generation Packaging, Kitting, and Palletizing: Can one robot do it all?