Packaging isn't just about what consumers see when they buy food at the supermarket. It preserves products, seals out contaminants and convey messages to the consumer. But how familiar are you with what goes on behind the scenes? And do you know what other companies are using?
At Pack Expo 2013, Food Dive saw demonstrations of machines that do food packaging. From super-fast and ultra-precise robot arms to robots that can distinguish among different shapes, sizes and colors, these Pack Expo's most interesting packaging machines in motion:
IDENTIFICATION, PLEASE
Company:Kawasaki
These Kawasaki robots can identify and distinguish individual products by their color, shape and imagery. The robot software hooks up to a standard, color 2D camera. The camera sends raw image data to the software, which then compares each product to the images in its database.
Jonathan Spencer, mechanical engineer at Kawasaki Robotics North America, told Food Dive about the circulating loop on display below.
"We created a database of Welch's bags: red, blue and purple," he explained. "The robot looks for the outline of the Welch's logo and, once it finds the logo, it looks for the color." The robot has thus identified what product it is and then executes the corresponding command associated with the product. In this demonstration, the red, blue and purple bags placed into a cardboard box in three separate, color-coded stacks:
SUPER-FAST ROBOT ARMS
Company:Stäubli Robotics
These robot arms from Stäubli Robotics are super fast. In the demonstration with poker chips (first video below), the arms are used in a load-sharing pick-and-place system. The parts are detected through a vision system and the software assigns the part to a robot and a place to put it. The system essentially tells each robot what to do. The robots are, however, not even running at full speed. If they did, nothing would get past them (check out the second video below for the robot arms at full speed). Bob Rochelle, food packaging specialist at Stäubli Robotics, tells Food Dive the machine does multiple parts. "It could be chicken legs here, chicken breasts there and thighs there to make sure you've got one of each in a package," he said. This allows for companies to create individual packages with, for example, two breasts, two legs and two thighs.
This video shows off the robot at full speed:
DON'T BREAK MY WINE GLASS
Company:ACE Controls
Despite the sheer force of the fall, the wine glass in the video below doesn't break, spill or even move. According to Nick Niemiec, product engineer at Ace Controls, "If you didn't have our shock absorber如果那是一个春天或rubber pad or nothing at all—the wine would spill and the glass would break." The shock absorber is used in machines, conveyors and moving arms in manufacturing environments. But it's highly unlikely that anyone would want to rest a wine glass on top of their machine, so what's the real advantage? The demonstration is illustrates the shock absorber's capabilities, which is to bring mass in motion to gentle stop. The absorber eliminates the vibrations and harsh reaction force that normally occurs. "Without the absorber, you would have noise and possible damage to the machine," Niemiec said.
THE FAST FOOD SERVICE ROBOT
Company:Epson
From its disparate parts, this robot assembles the perfect cheeseburger with all the trimmings. The demonstration below showcases circular conveyor tracking with a six-axis clean robot. The bot is designed to work with food and can handle packaged and raw goods. The parts come down onto a turntable in random orientation and the robot can track the parts with sensors or a vision system to determine what they are, where they are and assemble them, in this case, into a cheeseburger. "The reality is, even though this is making a hamburger, it's material handling," Phil Baratti, Applications Engineering Manager at Epson Robots, told Food Dive. "That's what robots do, they handle materials."
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