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Industry Leaders Bring New Technology to Showroom Floor at PACK EXPO East 2020

March 05, 2020 by Stephanie Leonida

The latest PACK EXPO East event brings together the fore-runners in packaging automation to showcase their new developments. 

This year’s PACK EXPO East is taking place this week at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia. It is one of the largest events in the industry, exhibiting the latest advancements in packaging machinery, equipment, automation technology and controls for a wide range of industries. 

 

What is PACK EXPO?

PACK Expo East serves prominent industries in automation including food and beverage, pharmaceutical/medical, cosmetics/personal care and industrial/household chemical, require state-of-the-art technologies and automated systems to enhance and optimize the packaging of their products.

Technologies designed to support the packaging process such as robots, robots and other automated systems, need to be safe, efficient and equitable, by maintaining high throughput.  

 

Industry Leaders Exhibiting New Innovations

This year, the expo features exhibitors such as BluePrint Automation (BPA) and Omega Design Corporation.

BPA has been a global leader in packaging automation for 40 years and specializes in vision-guided robotics for picking and loading products. They also use case and tray packing and turnkey packaging systems to allow packaging control from end-of-line through to palletizing.

Omega has over 50 years of experience in developing innovative packaging automation machinery and serialization for pharmaceutical and medical industries.

Attendees of the 2020 expo can expect an overview of Omega’s automatic bottle unscramblers, track and trace equipment, desiccant Feeders, and Shrinkbundlers. 

ABB also utilizes vision-guided robotics to fine-tune the packaging process. One of their latest bots, the IRB 360 FlexPicker, is setting the stage for picking and packing technologies. This device is the most widely used Delta robot in the industry.

Variants of the IRB 360 can withstand high payloads and can pick-and-place 500 products per minute. Sanitary models are available for food handling or pharmaceuticals and IP69K rated stainless model for wash down applications. 

 

ABB Flex-picker

The IRB 360 FlexPicker. Image used courtesy of ABB.

 

Other major industry leaders in packaging automation exhibiting at the expo include Balluff Inc. and Keyence Corporation.

Both Balluff and Keyence offer machine vision and optical identification of the production process through their supply of accurate sensors and smart cameras. 

At the PACK EXPO in Las Vegas, 2019, Emerson Automation and Busse/SJI Corporation, a manufacturer of palletizing equipment, presented their Palletizer Health Application. This application monitors pneumatics and vibration of palletizing machines like the Busse SJI Viper High-Speed Bulk Palletizer and Alpha Turbo TM High-Speed Depalletizer.

The application serves to notify operators of any errors, provide potential solutions and overall, maintain product throughput. 

At the 2019 expo, Universal Robots and Allied Technology also demonstrated the utility of Universal Robotics cobots. These cobots are simple to deploy and work together seamlessly in vision-guided conveyor tracking, robotic pick-and-place, bag dispensing, bag loading and unloading, bag sealing, case erecting, case loading, and robotic palletizing.

 

universal robotics cobot

Universal Robotics cobot demonstrated on showroom floor. 

 

Another bot featured in the 2019 expo came from ProMach company, Quest, in the form of the space-saving, skid-based Boxed-Bot Robotic Palletizer. This palletizer allows click-and-drag, customizable pallet pattern building and high stack patterns to optimize product density on pallets. 

 

What Opportunities and Insights Will You Gain from the 2020 EXPO?

The 2020 expo offers a space for customers and suppliers to come together. Suppliers, operators, controllers, and engineers can use this opportunity to survey the usability of their solutions and technologies.

Small and large companies from the automation industry alike will be able to collaborate with new industry suppliers requiring specific automation needs.

If you are not attending this expo, PACK EXPO International is going to be held in Chicago from November 8 to 11, 2020.

 


Are you attending PACK EXPO East?