Page 40 - Packaging News magazine March_April 2023

ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION
PLOT twist:
the robot is
the machine
Packaging machinery is built backwards. Machine builders have been doing a terrific job evolving automated packaging for the past century. It is time to stop evolving. It is time for a revolution. The Packaging Line of Tomorrow must be built around robots, writes packaging journalist John Henry.
ROBOTS ARE PLAYING an ever-greater role in all areas of our lives and packaging is no exception. They
are integrated into virtually every type of packaging machinery and that’s the problem. Robots need to be the machine, not just part of it.
The first industrial robots became available in the 1970s. They have really come into their own in the past 20 years as motors and controls became more sophisticated and easier to use. Originally, they could only pick and place between known positions. Machine vision (cameras) has changed that. Now the camera identifies the position and orientation and guides the robot to it as well as guiding placement. Artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D vision systems are taking this capability even further.
Virtually all packaging operations, from bottle orienting to palletising, can be executed by robots. It’s time to start doing that. Here are six reasons why:
1SPEED TO PRODUCTION
Most packaging machinery is built to order and can take six months or
more to design, build, debug and install. Packagers can’t afford to wait months between idea and implementation. Delays represent lost sales. Delays of new products bring the threat of being scooped by the competition.
Most robots and integration com- ponents are built to stock and can be shipped immediately.
2 STANDARD DESIGN
Most packaging machinery, even stan- dard machines, requires customisation. Robots are standard designs with the only customisation being end-of-arm tooling. Even that is now available off the shelf for most packaging applica- tions. Customisation that used to be done in hardware can now largely be done in software.
3FAST CHANGEOVER
Few companies today have the lux- ury of dedicated packaging lines. Most produce dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different products. This requires expensive downtime for product changeover. Five to 10 hours of weekly changeover downtime is not uncom- mon. To put that into perspective, five lost hours weekly is 250 hours annually. For a line running 150ppm (products per minute), that is more than 200 mil- lion unproduced and unsold products per year. Nobody can afford that.
40 ❙ MARCH – APRIL 2023
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