See what’s really modular at PACK EXPO…and why you should care.

ELAU’s theme for this year’s show—GET REAL, GET MODULAR—is a friendly challenge to competitive claims about modularity that aren’t so real upon closer inspection. After all, copying and pasting hundreds of lines of ladder logic isn’t exactly modular.

ELAU (N-3429) is making it simpler than ever to design modular machinery, using a powerful programming template and the industry’s most extensive library of pre-tested software modules such as ELAU’s exclusive robotic software library.

You’ll also see plenty of robotic functionality in ELAU customers’ machines at PACK EXPO—and in this report. ELAU’s robotic software library takes care of the complex kinematic algorithms and lets OEMs concentrate on designing innovative robotic packaging processes—not integrating third party robots and ‘black box’ robot controllers.

Robot control would overwhelm a PLC-based machine controller, but ELAU’s
PacDrive architecture can do it all—run multiple robot arms, synchronize all the machine functions, serve up management data and communicate with the other machines in the line.

But the big story from a hardware standpoint is the world premier at PACK EXPO of the radical new PacDrive iSH Series Intelligent Servo Modules. These modules free up a lot of electrical cabinet space (and cost) by eliminating the need for separate servo drives. They cut cabling in half, because a single cable runs out to the servo modules.