Robot arms popped up everywhere at the show, in the main for moving materials from one position to another, loading a pallet or filling a box say. Some went further.
Fujifilm demonstrated a fully automated cutting line that could take a printed sheet, or stack of sheets holding multiple products, and feed them through a sequence of processes leading to packed flyers or leaflets.
The demonstration followed immediately after Fujifilm extolled the virtues of its two B2 digital presses, the Revoria GC12500 toner press and the Jetpress 750HS. This has gained the ability to produce cartons through adjustments to sheet handling an inline Kompac coater and a food safe aqueous ink.
The output can be tackled by the series of robots that pick up the sheets, jog and aerate them ready for another pair robot arms to manipulate the sheets under a guillotine blade. The system can adjust the skew of a stack that has been cut ahead of the next action. Once completed the products are loaded to a pallet and an AMR robot can move the job to a warehouse, or can load the products to a box for delivery.
What is seen at Drupa is still at the protototype stage. The system was delivered with the help of Henrik Christiansen, a Danish specialist in robots for print, but more used to large systems in major companies like Stibo. This is for smaller businesses and addresses the acute labour shortage issues.
The robots come from Yamagawa. The special grips can count how many sheets to lift, from data in the workflow, and manipulate the stacks according to the digital imposition scheme.
The company expects the system to be ready for market at the start of next year.
Fujifilm was not alone in demonstrating human free production. Mimaki was using a robot arm to load its UJF UV flatbed printers that are typically used to produce promotional goods. Here the robot arm is used to pick the product, load it to the printer and once printed to offload to a box or pallet before starting the cycle again.
Meanwhile GUK is using a robot to load folded and banded pharmaceutical leaflets to packing trays in a tireless, faultless fashion, these can be loaded as trays to move to the next step in production to a customer knowing that presentation is no longer going to be an issue.
