Koenig & Bauer has teamed up with Munich robotics company RobCo to bring a ‘no coding required’ palletising CoBo robot to its customers.
The first fruits of the collaboration were on show to shareholders at the company’s AGM last week where the partnership was officially unveiled.
Both Heidelberg and Komori already have this sort of robot in their portfolio, but they also have folding machines which is where most robot arms are deployed. Meanwhile Koenig & Bauer has automated pallet handling and logistics around its die cutters including its rotary die cutter to stripping and palletising for high volume carton production.
The RobCo alliance is aimed at a different part of the market. “RobCo’s robot systems are designed to automate the intermediate steps that arise between the actual printing process and the subsequent processing of the materials,” says the company.
“This partnership is the fundamental key element of an open, highly flexible automation ecosystem with which Koenig & Bauer is positioning itself as a general contractor for holistic, end to end production processes.”
A key element of the RobCo technology is the use of plug and play technology to train and set up the robots, lowering the barrier to adoption at a time when companies across the world are finishing it harder to recruit staff for these roles.
The Munich company has focused on ease of adoption saying that automation projects often fail not because of the robotics themselves, but because of the complexity involved.
The robots will fall under the control of a Factory & Machine Automation department that Koenig & Bauer has set up to operate across its product ranges. Vice president of the division Markus Fraude says: “We are deliberately placing our strategic focus on the postpress sector. Regardless of the respective printing sector, the enormous performance of modern production facilities is limited exactly here – in further processing – by manual intermediate steps. The aim of our partnership is to close these gaps through smartly orchestrated robotics applications – from automated material feeding to final palletising.”
The division will work with targeted customers to implement the technology and to understand how and where best to use the technology and taking steps towards a lights out print factory.
Visitors to the AGM saw two of the robots in operation. One was outside the hall hosting the event where it demonstrated automated pallet loading. The second was on stage stacking Lego sets with precision.
The AGM passed all the motions in line with the board of directors. It heard how Koenig & Bauer is adopting AI within the business to accelerate decision making and improve internal processes. An AI agent has been deployed for the Rapida 145 large format press to make sense of all the data generated by the machine and processing this to cut repair times by 20% and improve the first time fix rate.
