Intelligent Robots Promote the Upgrade of Flexible Manufacturing in Daily Glass Products
The trend of ‘machines replacing humans’ is sweeping across various industries. Behind the small Glass Bottles lies a burgeoning “smart manufacturing” blue ocean market.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of glass. Daily glass products (referred to as “daily glass”) such as food, beverages, cosmetics, drinkware, pharmaceutical packaging, lighting, decoration, and small household appliances are closely connected to people’s lives. According to data from the China Packaging Federation and the China Daily Glass Association, in 2023, the number of large-scale daily glass manufacturing enterprises in China exceeded one thousand, with daily glass products and glass packaging containers reaching a production volume of 24.8227 million tons and a market size of over 180 billion yuan.
Traditional standardized glass bottles and cups are the most common products, occupying the majority of the daily glass market share. However, with the improvement of living standards and changes in consumer groups, consumers are demanding more diversity, personalization, and aesthetics in glass products for food, beverages, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
Technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, IoT, and digital twins are driving a wave of automation and intelligent transformation in the global manufacturing industry. The daily-use glass industry is entering a critical period of transformation and upgrading. Developing “new quality productivity,” improving labor efficiency in production, and achieving high-end, small-batch, multi-specification, and high-quality production in the daily-use glass manufacturing industry have become urgent tasks.
Currently, the daily-use glass industry has already seen several innovative technological achievements. Some leading companies have mastered certain intelligent manufacturing technologies that have long restricted the development of the daily-use glassware industry, such as robotics, sensing technology, complex manufacturing systems, and intelligent information processing technologies.
With the improvement of the domestic robotics industry chain, the trend of domestic substitution and replacing human labor with machines is profoundly changing the daily-use glass manufacturing industry. In the production process of glass, from raw materials to forming, there are many environmental variables and complex process mechanisms, which place high demands on the stability, ease of deployment, high-temperature resistance, and operational rhythm of robots.
According to the actual production line requirements, current daily-use glass production robots mainly include parallel robots, gantry robots, SCARA robots, four- and six-axis general-purpose robots, among other types. They can be applied to processes such as ingredient handling, bag opening, kiln inspection, hot repairs, mold oiling, material picking, flipping and molding, sorting into kilns, bottle loading and unloading, spraying, printing, boxing, packaging, palletizing, and warehouse logistics, covering production stages in the glass industry including the hot end, cold end, and deep processing.
Once a traditional daily-use glass production line starts, it requires continuous human labor. Daily-use glass production robots can work 24 hours a day, replacing humans in repetitive tasks in high-temperature, oily, and noisy environments. Combined with machine vision for inspection, recognition, and positioning, they ensure the quality of the entire production line from the front end, reduce human-caused damage and defects in glass products, and shorten the product delivery cycle for companies.
As a key part of the intelligent production line for daily-use glass, the current daily-use glass production robots are still in the early stages. Both core technologies and application processes need continuous iterative optimization. However, the trend of intelligent development is leading a transformation in global daily-use glass production methods, making the manufacturing of mid-to-high-end daily-use glass products easier and more convenient, meeting the diverse needs of consumers in the new era.
Daily-Use Glass Production Robots: The Untapped Blue Ocean Market Application
According to data from the GaoGong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII), in 2024, China’s industrial robot shipments reached 302,000 units, with applications in the three major fundamental sectors—automobiles and parts, 3C electronics, and new energy—accounting for over 70%.
The daily-use glass industry is an emerging downstream application area for robots. There are numerous daily-use glass manufacturers both domestically and internationally, with strong demand for intelligent and flexible production upgrades. This is especially true in the fields of glass packaging manufacturing for food and beverages, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, which have become new highlights in global industrial robot shipment growth.
According to research by Gogo Robot, the daily-use glass sector involves numerous processes. About 20 types of daily-use glass production robots can be applied across the entire production line, including ingredient preparation, forming, annealing, packaging, deep processing, and warehouse handling, performing tasks such as unpacking, material turning, loading and unloading bottles, sorting, spraying, printing, placing lids, palletizing, and transporting.
From ingredient preparation to deep processing and storage, introducing fewer than 20 robots on a single production line can replace the work of approximately 67 people, with each robot averaging the work of 3-4 people. After intelligent upgrades in a single factory (e.g., with 2 kilns and 8 production lines), robots can replace the output of around 280 former workers.
Glass Packaging Container Manufacturing Process and Required Robotic Intelligent Equipment Diagram
Based on the 1.755 million units of robots in China in 2023 released by IFR (International Federation of Robotics), the current penetration rate of industrial robots in China’s manufacturing industry exceeds 15%. However, in the food and beverage and daily chemical packaging sectors, the robot penetration rate is less than 3%, indicating huge development potential.
In 2023, the number of above-scale daily glass manufacturing enterprises in China exceeded 1,000. Through industry research and calculations, Gao Gong Robotics found that the robot market size in China’s daily glass industry was approximately 780 million RMB in 2023, with domestic daily glass producers demanding around 4,000 robots.
As the penetration rate of robots in the daily glass industry increases, the number of large-scale enterprises in the daily glass products and glass containers sector will grow, and the update of intelligent production lines will accelerate significantly. It is estimated that by 2028, the market size of production robots for daily glass in China could reach 1.985 billion RMB, and the global market size could reach 14.16 billion RMB.
Focusing on the core production processes of everyday glass manufacturing, several models of daily glass production robots have successfully entered the market and been applied in factories. However, the overall technological barriers in this field are high, downstream customers are dispersed, penetration rates are relatively low, and traditional robot industry chain integrators rarely venture into this area. Currently, most daily glass production robots are developed by equipment manufacturers within the daily glass industry, and the market is still in its infancy.
At present, most products from daily glass robot manufacturers are concentrated on individual processes such as loading and unloading, stacking, and handling at the cold end of production. Only a few manufacturers can cover multiple processes across the entire production line, including forming, hot end, cold end, and post-processing.
For example, Hubei Chuda Intelligent has developed over ten types of robot applications, including material-flipping robots, random sorting robots, spraying bottle loading and unloading robots, decorating kiln bottle loading and unloading robots, and stacking robots, covering a wide range of process stages; Shanghai Shunzhang has developed material-picking and container loading and unloading robots; Swiss Bucher Emhart Glass, Germany’s HEYE, and Shandong Sanjiang Intelligent have launched forming-end oiling robots; German MSK Packaging, Italy’s All Glass, Hangzhou Yongchuang Intelligent, and Jiangsu Stack have launched cold-end stacking robots.
From the perspective of revenue scale and shipments of robot-related products, Chuda Intelligent is the leading company in this segment and has already deployed multiple intelligent robot products in daily glass production lines.
Regarding the application of manufacturing processes in daily glass production lines, robots offer unique advantages in areas such as consistency of glass product quality, improvement of production efficiency, adaptability to high-temperature environments, and multi-product mixed-line production.
During the glass bottle and jar forming stage, flipping robots can replace traditional manual operations of picking up, kneading, flipping, and placing hot preforms, achieving highly consistent production of glass bottles without holding rings and freeing labor from the high-intensity repetitive tasks in this high-temperature process.
Oiling robots can perform spray oil coating on preforms and neck molds during the forming stage, replacing approximately 700 manual oiling actions that were previously completed by workers in 8 hours. This not only saves on oil usage but also ensures consistency of the oiling process, reduces defective products, minimizes soot generation, and extends mold life. For example, the oiling robot developed by Sanjin Glass (Emhart) allows factories to switch from three production lines with nine workers performing high-intensity manual oiling to automated, precise machine oiling operations.
In hot-end production, robot end-effectors need to perform grasping tasks in high-temperature environments, which places extremely high demands on their structural design, heat resistance, and material strength. For example, Shanghai Shunzhang uses ABB’s glass picking robot solution, which can extract molten glass of equal weight from the furnace.
In the hot-end random sorting stage, robots can replace humans in sorting various bottles and jars at the high-temperature furnace mouth of 200°C–300°C in the annealing furnace. For instance, the high-temperature-resistant dual-robot version of the random sorting robot custom-developed by Chuda Intelligent, combined with machine vision technology, can achieve multiple functions such as feeding and sorting.
In the deep processing stage of glass bottles and jars, robots for loading and unloading in the decorating oven can completely replace humans to accurately perform operations such as grasping, placing, capping, and uncapping.
In the cold-end stacking and packaging stage, leveraging machine recognition and motion control technology, stacking robots can carry out complex combined tasks such as high-strength, high-speed automatic stacking, palletizing, handling, and boxing of glass containers.
According to GGII data, in 2023, robots used for handling, palletizing, and loading and unloading processes accounted for more than 60% of the industrial robot application market in China. The intelligent application of robots on daily glass production lines is also mostly concentrated in this field, offering broad market awareness and promising segmented application prospects.
Technological breakthroughs: from single-line intelligence to smart factories
The daily-use glass industry has an urgent need for intelligent production and the upgrading of mid-to-high-end products, but the application of robots in this niche market is still in its early stages. There is still a long way to go in areas such as market awareness education, product usability, insight into factory intelligence needs, process optimization iterations, and overcoming technical barriers for pain points and difficult challenges.
From a technical perspective, production robots for daily-use glass are only considered to have ‘entered the field’ once they overcome several core challenges.
The first is high-temperature resistance. Robots and their supporting fixtures operating on the hot end must be able to work in high-temperature environments of 200°C to 300°C, have high protection and stability, and still be easy to deploy in confined spaces, with requirements for the robot’s weight, load-bearing capacity, and the materials of the tools.
The second is work cycle coordination. High-speed motion control and production line scheduling capabilities are required to ensure that bottle-making equipment and robots operate in sync during processes such as loading and unloading, sorting, handling, and spraying.
The third is visual recognition technology. In mixed-line production of different types of glass bottles, factors such as bottle size, color variation, ambient lighting, and height differences affect visual recognition results. Continuous optimization of algorithms and programs is needed to achieve flexible production.
Finally, robots need to accumulate an understanding of different stages of the daily-use glass production line, enable cooperation and interoperability with various automated equipment, exhibit long-term high stability, and meet the personalized needs of glass manufacturers.
From the perspective of technological development, there is an urgent need to improve the medium- to high-end, customized, and flexible production technologies for daily-use glass products. The increasing demand for cost reduction and efficiency enhancement in manufacturing enterprises is bound to bring a more profound transformation in the production methods of daily-use glass manufacturers. From the automation of individual processes, to the intelligence of entire production lines and quality inspection across all production procedures, and then to the visualization and datafication of the overall factory production, these are the future directions for the evolution of the daily-use glass industry.
Deeply integrating robots with visual technology to improve operational accuracy, developing more robot substitution solutions for production lines, and enhancing overall production efficiency remain goals that are urgently to be tackled at this stage
Taking the leading industry company Chuda Intelligent as an example, Chuda Intelligent is developing more efficient integrated technologies, including industry-specific robots, high-speed hybrid robots, and intelligent visual inspection systems, to meet process requirements such as loading and unloading, depalletizing, and stacking glass bottles with a production capacity of ≥6,000 units per hour. By overcoming the core processes of more production workflows, it promotes the industry’s further advancement toward automated and intelligent production.
As an emerging application market, the complex processes and production characteristics of the daily-use glass industry place higher demands on robot-related technologies. Beyond the production procedures of daily-use glass products, foundational technologies such as robot motion control and visual inspection are equally applicable to other industries. For example, in flexible production applications like handling, packaging, stacking, and inspection in the food, 3C electronics, and automotive parts industries, there is also broad market potential for technology transfer.
Whether in the daily-use glass industry or in countless other industries, focusing on core robotic technologies, accumulating experience in flexible production solutions, and advancing from intelligent single production lines to multi-process, full-process smart factories is the mission and vision of all smart manufacturing companies. Through iterations of innovative robotic technologies, the intelligent blueprint for the daily-use glass manufacturing industry will ultimately be realized. Though the road is long, walking it will lead to success.
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