The Japanese have pioneered robots in all walks of life, from Honda’s Asimo domestic robot to the robots used in the same company’s car factories. More than a decade ago print factories might have AGVs to move work in progress to a dark warehouse and from there to a finishing line. Others have placed plates in position on newspaper presses without operator assistance. But such technology has been confined to Japan – until now.
The recent Igas was marked less by the print and finishing technology on view than by the robots used to move material around the equipment. RMGT and Komori led the way from press suppliers while Horizon was unquestionably the leader from the finishing point of view. If a job can be moved automatically through the prepress process where the job is in a digital format, why can’t it be moved automatically once it becomes physical with ink on paper?
One AMR robot was deployed to move a stack of printed B1 sheets from an RMGT 970PF-8 LED UV press to the Horizon stand where an AFC746F folder was waiting for the stack to be loaded. It then kicked off production, with a robot arm at the delivery end to pick up and load a pallet. Another robot, perhaps the original machine, then takes the pallet to a newly developed gathering line. Here there is a human operator, loading the separate hoppers. It can be configured from six to 36 feeding stations. The gathered book block heads into the BQ500 perfect binder and from there to an HT300 trimmer, again with all settings changing automatically and on the fly according to job data downloaded from Horizon’s IceLink cloud based production network.
“There were 21 demonstrations on the stand at Igas,” says IFS technical sales director Jason Seaber, “and this was by far the most popular.”
The line is configured to produce 800 books an hour (the limit for the BQ500). However, it is not yet a deliverable product, more a technology demonstration, says Seaber. But it points in the direction the company is thinking. “It’s suited to short to medium run book production and needs just one operator so the cost of production becomes very very low,” he adds.
Human labour has been replaced by robots. The recruitment crisis in Japan if anything is more acute than in Europe and the US, making robots less of a nice to have and more of a must-have. “The interest level in Europe is increasing. There are customers in Europe using robot arms and AGVs and in the UK we expect to be involved with projects that include the same sort of automation because there is a chronic shortage of skilled labour and as people learned during the pandemic, when you don’t have the right skill set, it’s very difficult to continue manufacturing. If there is investment in automation even with minimal skill levels you can still produce books and there will be a business out the other side of recession.”
As well as the robots to move materials, Horizon has its own projects using different robot arms, built on Omron technology. One of these can be positioned at the delivery of a trimmer to load three pallets at once, either by books to go to be case bound, and glue bound finished books, perhaps by those to be delivered to a customer and those to go to a warehouse to eliminate a further sortation process.
Another Omron arm was deployed to load books to a BQ270 single-clamp binder. Again this was a fully enclosed system, the sheets being printed on Riso’s Valezus T2200 inkjet press into a jogger to create the block that the robot loads into the binder. “You still need a person around, perhaps looking after several pieces of equipment,” he continues.
Another solution involved taking sheets printed by Fujifilm’s new B2 Revoria toner press with an AMR robot moving the pallet to the latest version of the SmartStacker, cutting the sheet into book blocks and via a conveyor to the BQ500 binder and HT1000V trimmer.
While AGV and AMR robots can be employed with existing technology, the greater benefit comes with more automated machinery, designed for hands-free operation. Horizon’s StitchLiner MkV is for saddle stitching from an inkjet printed reel, using marks to define start and finish of each book.
Much of that technology underlines the cut sheet versions, the StitchLiner MkIV. It is on the one hand a development of the highly successful StitchLiner MkIII with more accurate handling, one with the other it includes lessons from the roll fed unit. The nipping section after the plow section is lengthened to produce a sharper finish on the spine. The Hohner stitching heads are wired into the device to enable automatic adjustment of the stitching wire length so that the machine can move from say, a 16pp product with relatively short wires to a 64pp book requiring a much longer wire to achieve a robust stitch.
It is a set up that responds to the increasing demand for production of ultra short products, either printed digitally or by litho. It can be fed from conventional collator towers or from a digital sheet feeder.
The AFV 566 FKT folder is already in the field, two being in use at Solopress, for example. Every setting can be moved through servo motors, a single sheet delivered for checking. The folder then runs up to its set operating speed. The device is checking the gaps between sheets through the buckle and cross fold sections and adjusts the feeder to minimise this gap. The mechanical speed remains the same, but output increases because the fractions of a second dead time have been eliminated.
Labour and time saving lie behind developments on the rotary die cutter says Seaber. This now has a separator and card stacker. “We believe it’s a game changer for some applications,” he says. That includes small format cards, business cards which are first separated into different jobs from the multi job sheet. Each is presented as a separate stack that can be picked up by hand or a small robot for banding or shrink wrapping.
Horizon and thus IFS, has not previously had a stacked delivery option. Now IFS is considering installation of the technology at its Hemel Hempstead showroom and having it as the focus for an open house.
The central spine connecting the products, apart from the mobile robots, is the Ice Link production system. It is JDF/JMF enabled so that integration with other suppliers is possible. At Igas this was demonstrated with Heidelberg’s Prinect workflow, passing job data from the German prepress system through its press and into IceLink to download to which piece of equipment was to be used. In turn details of job progress were collected by Ice Link and passed back to Prinect for onward transmission to an MIS.
Seaber says: “Horizon wants to drive connectivity and recognises that this will mean collaborating with other companies, perhaps even competitors. Horizon is open to that as the presence at Igas demonstrated.”
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