Pester USA introduced ‘pac robot’ modules using ELAU’s new PacDrive robotic software library to expand the flexibility and throughput of pharma, cosmetics and food packaging lines.

The pack robot 3 was demonstrated with a PEWO-pack 450 Compact bottle wrapper for the health & beauty care industry (e.g., shampoo bottles). Continuous product guidance allows gentle handling of up to 300 unstable bottles per minute.

As bottles were discharged from the labeler, they entered the collating unit where the pac robot 3 picked two sets of six bottles, indexed them 90° and placed them on the wrapper’s infeed belt. Bottles were inserted into the servo-controlled, single-lane sealing unit at up to 50 cpm, and wrapped and sealed in PE film before entering the new PEWO-therm shrink tunnel.

The new pac robot 4 was the heart of a top-loading robotic cell. At April’s interpack show, a pac robot 4 loaded cartons into trays produced by a thermoformer. A vision system communicated the cartons’ orientation to an ELAU PacDrive controller, which performed the calculations for the robot to precisely pack the trays at speeds up to 100 cycles per minute.

The new robots can also be integrated into third party machines.