Wirawan Sumbodo, Rofex Pambudi, Rizki Setiadi
The large-scale fertilizer industry faces challenges in the material handling process, especially in moving heavy and repetitive fertilizer sacks. The manual process used not only burdens the workforce physically but also risks causing work injuries, time inefficiencies, and inconsistent handling quality. Therefore, an automation-based solution is needed to improve productivity and work safety. This study aims to design and analyze a pick-and-place robot that can be used in the fertilizer industry to enhance the efficiency of the production process, especially in moving fertilizer sacks weighing up to 50 kg. The design method used is the French Method, which consists of the stages of problem analysis, conceptual design, schematic form, and detailing. The design was carried out using Autodesk Inventor for 3D modelling and ANSYS for simulation of loading on the robot gripper. The gripper was designed using a pneumatic system with an 18-fork structure and validated through mesh simulations to ensure its strength and stability. This study also involved design selection based on expert validation and mesh element quality analysis. The study results show that the gripper design has an average skewness value of 0.49, which is included in the "outstanding" category, indicating that the design is feasible for implementation in the fertilizer industry automation system. This pick-and-place robot's implementation is expected to replace manual processes, reduce human workload, and increase industrial effectiveness and productivity. Copyright © 2025 Reports in Mechanical Engineering. All rights reserved.
Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia
