ROBOTICS IN PACKAGING: INTEGRATION, SAFETY AND COLLABORATION
Elisabeth Skoda speaks to three industry leaders to find out more about how robotics and automation help tackle the challenges the industry faces today.
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the autumn of 2020, Japanese engineers presented a 18 metre-tall, 25-tonne heavy humanoid robot that could walk, wave its hand and even take the knee. This giant Gundam robot was inspired by a 1970s anime series that subsequently evolved into a multi-billion-dollar franchise. The technical challenges that had to be overcome to achieve this kind of movement were immense, given the weight and size of the robot. On a smaller scale, robots have been a key part of the packaging industry for decades, and while advances maybe have not been as spectacular as Gundam, they are just as impressive.
Integration and flexibility A lot has happened in robotics since Unimate, the first industrial robot, and Shakey, the first autonomous robot, appeared in the early 1960s, says Patricia Torres, Industry Marketing Manager Food and Commodities Solutions at Omron Industrial Automation Europe. “The latest advances to fully integrate industrial robots into the automation system – enabling the capability to have a single brain to control both worlds – is proving to be crucial for the packaging industry, especially for highly automated lines. Also, over the years robotics technology has become more affordable and versatile, meaning it is increasingly being implemented in many industries beyond the traditional automotive sector. Alongside the development of AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) and cobots, this means manufacturers can improve the operations in areas like end of line packaging, co-packing, intralogistics or order fulfilment that were previously not considered as applications ready for robots.” | 8 | Packaging Europe
Mike Loughran, CTO for the UK and Ireland at Rockwell Automation, has also observed that robots are becoming more widely adopted across multiple industries.
“Today, we see more integration of robots of different sizes along the supply chain, being more adaptable and agile. Robots more often make up the very core of a machine.” “Today, we see more integration of robots of different sizes along the supply chain, being more adaptable and agile. Robots more often make up the very core of a machine.” Demand has driven the requirement of a much more flexible and agile machine, and one of the answers to that has been a great adoption of robots in all their different forms, as he points out. “In the past, robots worked in isolation. But today, an overall control scheme and integration are key, especially in areas such as beverages and CPGs with fast moving lines. Rockwell Automation has embraced the integration of robots via its standard control system that controls everything. For example, pick and place robots can be part of an overall system, which facilitates tight integration.” In order to facilitate integration, Rockwell Automation builds virtual software libraries, which help to set up a digital twin.
