We Need More of These Automation SolutionsWe Need More of These Automation Solutions

Another year and the biggest Pack Expo ever is in the bag. I tried to walk the entire show but probably only saw about 75% of it. What I did see was spectacular.

Here are a few things that grabbed me:

• I’ve long been saying that packaging machine builders go at robots backwards. The robot should be the basis of the machine rather than an add-on to a legacy platform. I was happy to find two companies that think like me.

Dyco robotic bottle orienter. John R. Henry, Changeover.com

This Dyco bottle orienter is two conveyors, a delta robot, camera, and controls. Bottles feed onto a wide conveyor. A camera identifies orientation and position. The robot picks them up and places them, oriented, on the discharge conveyor. It does this 100 times a minute.

OptiPlex Robot from PlexPack. John R. Henry, Changeover.com

PlexPack delighted me with their ultra-simple cobot bag filler. It consists of a collaborative robot, magazine, and filling station under the filling head. The cobot picks two bags, holds them open for filling, shakes the bags for settling, then places them on a takeaway conveyor for sealing.

It is hard to imagine anything much simpler.

We need to see more of these concepts in the future.

• Igus will help. They showed me a cobot that could do the bag loading and a delta robot that could orient bottles. What impressed me was the pricing. The cobot was priced at $6,899 which seems to be about 25% of the price of comparable robots.

Related:The State of Packaging Automation, Today & Tomorrow

Igus cobot. John R. Henry, Changeover.com

The delta was priced at $18,894, including vision-sensing system. It would not take much to make a bottle orienter out of it. Probably for less than $40,000-$50,000 out of pocket.

Igus Delta robot. John R. Henry, Changeover.com

• Some lower-tech — but even more impressive — machines were on display at the PACK Challenge. This is a PMMI program for high-school students from six Chicago-area schools. They are given a kit of parts and told to build a machine. This year, the challenge was a machine to feed plastic cups, changing over between sizes.

High-school students took on PMMI’s PACK Challenge to engineer a packaging machine to feed cups. PMMI

No two machines were even conceptually alike — but all did the job well. The Waterford team began their presentation by explaining the importance of changeover and how they addressed it. As the Changeover Wizard, their emphasis warmed my heart.

I talked to the teachers too and was impressed. They had the skills but mostly let the students find their own way. My kind of teaching! Kudos to students, teachers, schools, PMMI, and parts suppliers. This is a wonderful program, and I hope we’ll see it grow.

• I’ve been a fan of radio-frequency identification (RFID) forever. A longstanding issue was that passive tags would generally not work on a metal background such as machine changeparts. Balluff showed some small RFID tags and readers that do work on metal.

Related:How Timing Screws Transform Packaging Operations

Balluff RFID tags, readers for identifying metal parts. John R. Henry, Changeover.com

The picture shows a tag embedded in a rod in front of a sensor. The rod is passed in front of the sensor. If it is not correct, an alarm can be triggered.

All parts could be passed in front of one sensor for verification. Alternatively, small sensors could be installed at each mounting point.

• Specifications may be boring. Getting them wrong will add unwanted excitement. Even the simplest product, like a bottle of shampoo, can have hundreds of specification points interacting with each other. If you change the spec on the bottle surface treatment, will the label adhesive still work?

Specright showed a system to manage all specifications, as well as the relationships between specifications. It greatly simplifies a complex task.

With more than 2,700 exhibitors in more than 1.3 million square feet, it was impossible to see everything. I tried! A week later I was still recovering but already looking forward to Pack Expo 2025 in Las Vegas.