Views: 0 Author: Fannie Chen Publish Time: 2026-07-10 Origin: SZGH
I didn't get into robotics because I had a five-year plan for it. Thirteen years ago we were a CNC controller company in Shenzhen. Then one day a factory manager asked us, "Can you do machine tending?" We said yes, went and figured it out, and that's basically how SZGH ended up building robot arms. I tell people this because it matters for what follows: everything in this guide comes from watching real robots stack real pallets in real factories — not from a spec sheet written to sound impressive.
If you're reading this, you're probably somewhere between "we need to stop paying people to stack 25kg bags by hand" and "I have three quotes on my desk and I don't know which one is right." I've sat across the table from that exact person more times than I can count. So let me walk you through it the way I would if you were standing in our factory.
A palletizing robot arm is an industrial robot — usually four-axis, sometimes six-axis — that picks up a product (a carton, a bag, a box, a case) from a conveyor and stacks it onto a pallet in a set pattern, layer after layer, until the pallet is full. That's the whole job description. It sounds simple because the concept is simple. What's not simple is matching the right robot to your actual product line, and that's where most buyers get stuck — and where most sales conversations skip past too quickly.
A robot arm by itself isn't a solution. What you're really buying is a small system built around our palletizing robot arm lineup:
The robot body (the arm itself)
An end-of-arm tool — a gripper, vacuum suction plate, or clamp — that actually touches your product
A conveyor or infeed to bring product to the robot
A pallet positioning area or conveyor to take the finished pallet away
A control cabinet and, in some cases, palletizing pattern software
Safety fencing, light curtains, or an interlocked gate
If a supplier is only talking to you about the robot arm and not asking about your product, your conveyor, and your floor layout, that's a signal they're selling a component, not solving your problem.
I'll be blunt: the market is full of people who will sell you a robot arm and disappear the moment you have a question about the gripper design. When we ship a SZGH-B series robot, we're thinking about the whole line — the bag, the box, the pallet, the plant floor — because a robot that can't be integrated is a robot that sits in the corner unused, no matter how good its spec sheet looks. That's not a slogan for us. It's a design requirement.
Before payload numbers or price, the first question I ask every customer is: what does your product look like, and how much does it weigh? This single answer eliminates 80% of the wrong options immediately. Here's how our own SZGH-B Handling Series breaks down by real payload, because I think concrete numbers are more useful than vague categories:
Model | Payload | Reach | Repeatability | Best fit |
6 kg | 1,000 mm | ±0.2 mm | Light parts handling, small stamping loading/unloading | |
10 kg | 1,500 mm | ±0.2 mm | Stamping line loading/unloading, light cartons | |
30 kg | 1,850 mm | ±0.2 mm | Standard carton and box palletizing, dual-pallet stacking | |
50 kg | 2,300 mm | ±0.2 mm | Medium-weight box and case palletizing, taller stacks | |
100 kg | 2,100 mm | ±0.2 mm | Heavy-duty bag palletizing (chemical, feed, cement) | |
165 kg | 3,100 mm | ±0.2 mm | Super-heavy loads — cast metal ingots, industrial billets |
A couple of things worth pointing out here that most buying guides skip:
Payload has to include your gripper, not just your product. If your bag weighs 25kg and your vacuum gripper weighs 8kg, you need at least 33kg of usable payload — not 25kg. This is the single most common mis-sizing mistake I see, and it's an easy one to avoid by just asking your supplier for the gripper weight up front.
Reach determines your pallet layout, not just your speed. Our B1850-3C-4, for example, has enough reach at 1,850mm that one robot can stack two pallets side by side — we did exactly this for a customer running 1.1m × 1.1m cartons at a 1.6m stack height, and it let them run one robot instead of two. That's not a spec sheet claim; that's a job we actually installed.
Cartons and boxes. These are usually handled with vacuum grippers because carton surfaces are flat and uniform, and vacuum lets you pick up more than one carton at once if your cycle time demands it. Our B1850-3C-4 and B2300-E-4 are the two models we recommend most often here, depending on carton weight and stack height.
Bags — feed, cement, fertilizer, chemical powder. Bags are harder than cartons because they're irregular, they can shift mid-lift, and a bad gripper design tears them. This is exactly the job our B2100-F-4 was built for — we built it as a 100kg heavy-duty palletizing robot specifically because a chemical raw-material customer needed one robot handling an entire bag-feeding line, moving workers off a job that was both repetitive and physically hard on the body. That installation is still one of the clearest examples I point to when someone asks "does this actually work outside the brochure."
Metal ingots, billets, drums, and other super-heavy loads. This is where you need serious payload — 100kg-plus — and our B3100-G-4 at 165kg payload came directly out of a request from an aluminum ingot casting shop that needed to unload hot, heavy ingots without putting a person next to that risk every shift. It's the same thinking behind our broader metal fabrication automation work. If your material is dangerous or physically exhausting to move by hand, that's usually the strongest ROI case for automation, full stop — not because it sounds good, but because the labor risk and turnover cost on those positions is real and ongoing.
Most palletizing applications — stacking a box or bag onto a flat pallet in a repeating pattern — only need four axes. All six models in our Handling Series are four-axis for exactly this reason: four axes are simpler, faster to program, and less expensive to maintain, and palletizing doesn't usually require the complex wrist orientation that welding or grinding needs.
Six-axis robots earn their extra cost when you need to reach into odd angles, handle irregular product orientation, or combine palletizing with another task like sorting or inspection. If someone is quoting you a six-axis robot for a straightforward flat-pallet stacking job, ask them why — sometimes there's a good reason, and sometimes it's just a bigger invoice. You can see how we scope full-line automation, not just the robot, on our automation solutions overview.
I'm not going to give you a number here, because any number I give you would be wrong for your specific line, and I don't like giving numbers that create false expectations. What I will tell you is what actually moves the price, in the order I see it matter most:
Payload class. A 10kg robot and a 165kg robot are different machines with different motors, structure, and cost basis — not just a bigger number on the same design.
Reach. Longer reach means a bigger, more reinforced arm structure.
End-of-arm tooling. A simple single vacuum cup is inexpensive. A multi-pick vacuum array or a custom clamp for irregular bags costs more to engineer and build.
Conveyor and pallet infeed/outfeed integration. If you're integrating with an existing line versus building from scratch, this changes scope significantly.
Safety package. Fencing, light curtains, interlocked gates, and CE compliance documentation all add cost, and for export markets these usually aren't optional.
Installation and commissioning. Whether you need on-site engineering support or can commission with remote guidance changes the service cost, not the robot cost.
If a quote seems unusually low, ask specifically what's included in each of these six categories before you compare it to anyone else's number. I've seen too many buyers compare a robot-only price against a full-system price and think they found a bargain. Our certifications and patents page shows exactly what CE compliance documentation looks like when it's genuinely included, not just mentioned.
Every customer asks about payback period, and I respect that — it's the right question. Here's how I'd actually walk through it, rather than just quoting a generic "6 to 12 months" number:
Labor cost removed per shift. How many people are currently doing this task, at what wage, across how many shifts?
Throughput gained. Can the robot run a pace your current manual process can't sustain, especially on a second or third shift?
Injury and turnover cost avoided. Repetitive heavy lifting has real workers' comp and turnover costs that don't show up on a simple labor line but absolutely show up on your P&L over a year.
Uptime and maintenance cost added. A robot isn't free to run — factor in maintenance, spare parts, and the rare service call.
When we design our robots, including the collaborative models, we hold ourselves to a real-world deployment window — not a marketing number — because a robot that takes six months to integrate before it even starts paying you back isn't actually delivering the ROI on the sales sheet. That's a design philosophy, not just something we say to close a deal. You can read how this has played out for other factories in our case studies.
If you want a fast, accurate quote from any supplier — not just us — have these answers ready:
Product type: carton, bag, box, drum, or something else
Product size (L × W × H) and weight per unit
Line speed you need to match (units per minute or hour)
Pallet size (1200×1000mm, 1200×800mm, or your local standard)
Stack pattern: number of layers, target stack height
Factory layout — even rough photos or a sketch help enormously
Power supply: voltage and frequency
Safety requirements: fencing, light curtain, CE or other regional certification
Send that over and any competent supplier should be able to give you a real number within a day or two — not a placeholder "starting from" figure that changes three times during the sales process. If you want the fuller checklist before you reach out, our buyer's guide section walks through this in more depth, and our FAQ page covers the questions we get asked most often.
A palletizing robot arm isn't a magic fix, and it isn't a commodity part you should buy purely on price. It's a piece of your production line, and it needs to be sized to your actual product, integrated into your actual layout, and backed by a supplier who'll still answer the phone a year after the invoice is paid. We've built ours — the G1000-B-4 up through the B3100-G-4 — around exactly that principle: robots that get deployed and stay running, not robots that look impressive in a showroom and then sit idle because nobody planned for the gripper, the conveyor, or the floor space.
If you're trying to figure out which end of that payload table fits your line, send us your product weight, size, and line speed, and we'll tell you straight whether a robot makes sense for you yet — and if it doesn't, I'd rather tell you that now than sell you something that ends up in the corner of your plant. Browse the full palletizing and handling robot arm lineup or the complete robot arm catalog to compare models side by side.
Request a Custom Palletizing Robot Arm Quote — share your product size, weight, and line speed and our engineering team will respond within 24 hours.
Fannie Chen is CEO of Shenzhen Guanhong Automation Co., Ltd. (SZGH), founded in 2013 in Shenzhen, China. SZGH's robots and CNC systems are in use across 126 countries. Product specifications referenced in this article are drawn from SZGH's published SZGH-B Handling Series technical documentation.
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