The new Fallas Automation R700 Adabot™ robot is designed to pick products on the fly at high speed. Its ability to track the product and pick on the fly contributes to the speed. So do the arm’s carbon fiber construction and the controller’s ability to execute 10 times faster than a PLC. And in this case, it’s not a ‘black box’ robot controller, but an open architecture PacDrive™ automation controller from ELAU.

Adabot has yet another trick up its sleeve—the ability to add up to a total of 4 robot cells to easily reconfigure a case packing line for higher throughputs. And remarkably, it does so by simply plugging the new robot modules into the PacDrive controller.

A powerful alternative to the status quo

According to founder Dave Fallas, the company’s food and confectionary customers are looking for greater speed and flexibility while maintaining the integrity of products that are increasingly appearing in flexible primary packages. This led the company to select a more powerful automation platform than the status quo.

The fact that ELAU’s robotic software library allowed his engineers to focus on packaging innovation rather than robotic kinematics made the choice clear.

The resulting machine stands in stark contrast to general purpose robots from the automotive industry that are pressed into the case packing role with generally large foot prints and limited speed.

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