The 6000 F-6 robotic tray-loading system from Paal uses servo positioning accuracy to collate tubes and place them into plastic trays at speeds to 200 tubes/min.

Four servo drives and motors synchronizing the infeed system are supplied by ELAU. So is the PacDrive controller that governs both logic and motion on the high-speed infeed module.

Functions include: the pick-and-place motion of the tray denester/loader, the infeed belt on which trays are fed to the tube-loading robot, and the “racetrack” unit that collates tubes.

“The tubes must be placed precisely under the robot’s vacuum pick heads,” says Paal president Claus Paal. “It would be difficult to get this precision and repeatability with a mechanical system.

“What continues to please us about the ELAU servos is their modularity,” says Paal. “Our software programmers in particular like how easy it is to add another axis of motion should it be needed.”

The example he provides is when the machine design team decides that a pneumatically driven axis isn’t suitable, and they opt for servo-driven actuation. Because ELAU doesn’t use racks or modules with fixed numbers of drives, an additional servo or two can be added with ease, says Paal.

Such additions are equally easy from a software standpoint, he says, because there’s no need to write code from scratch. The software comes from a library of function blocks.

Set-up is further simplified because the drive reads descriptive information from a chip in the motor and configures itself to run that motor. The drive also sets its own parameters. Considering that a drive might have up to 250 parameters, this saves considerable time and effort.

By Pat Reynolds, Editor, Packaging World