This is an automated robot cell for the Australian Wool Testing Authority (AWTA)  to empty and clean the wool from trolleys of wool keepers.

A wool keeper is a special plastic container where wool samples are kept for a determined length of time for quality control purposes. At the end of the period the samples are collected according to their grades to be used.

The system accepts up to 3 trolleys of keepers and processes both sides of the rack by indexing the trolleys through the cell.

The custom tooling:

• Opens the keeper
• Cleans and wipes the bottom plate
• Uses special clamp fingers to clean the wool from the lid

The wool in the keeper is one of 3 grades. The system references a data base that identifies the keeper and wool grade of the sample. The sample wool when removed from the keeper and placed into one of 3 grade bins.