The rise and rise of robotic solutions and AI in the printing industry continues to drive productivity efficiencies and new opportunities, hence the tide of investment in both. In wide format, it is the advancement of collaborative robots – or cobots - that is starting to make the most noise: robots designed to work on the factory floor alongside people and use sensors to detect humans and avoid accidents.
The latest incarnation of the AGFA Onset flatbed series is this Panthera FB3216 with automated unloading.
Most cobots used in printing are robotic arms, bolted to a fixed position to allow them to handle heavy weights. In wide format they are most commonly used for loading and unloading boards and sheets from flatbed and hybrid presses.
Each robotic arm – or axis – is responsible for a specific movement in the process. Whilst five axis is enough for picking the substrates up, rotating them, moving them from palette to bed and placing them back down again, cobot nirvana for wide format includes a sixth axis, able to automatically – and precisely - flip the sheets over to print on the reverse side.
“Precision is the essential ingredient in any cutter,” said Dale Hawkins, Managing Director of Zünd Australia, now operating as a standalone subsidiary of the Swiss parent company. “As a well-regarded Swiss manufacturer, it is no surprise that their focus is on precision and automating as many steps of the process as possible to secure the best possible result.”
Zünd partners with Danish firm RobotFactory, which develops both standard and customized robot handling solutions. These can be used for loading but also for picking and packing finished objects. As well as industrial robots, RobotFactory also supplies smaller systems, called PortaTables, designed for quick and easy deployment.
When looking to enable fully automated loading for its Tauro XUHS and Onset Panthera FB3216 flatbed, Agfa went one step further and ended up buying Inca Digital, long since a proponent of robotics and who developed twin robots – the Max Bots - to automate the loading and unloading on these Agfa systems.
Durst too has developed a robotic solution for its P5 family of wide format hybrid presses. Mainly used with the P5 350 HS printer, which has the print speed to benefit from the robotic boost to productivity and therefore to justify the investment cost. The full solution involves two Kuka robotic arms either side of the printer, one for feeding and one for stacking printed jobs. The system includes an angled registration station on the side so the robot picks up the sheet from the stack, drops it onto the station and picks it up again, this time knowing exactly where the board is so that it can then place it in exactly the right position on the printer. This mechanical approach to registration enables it to handle thin materials like foil paper as well as cardboard and is faster and more accurate than using a sensor.
With the continued advances in AI and technology that speeds up the workflow of pre-press and production files, ‘collaboration with robotics/automation’ - cobots - are being specifically designed to tackle the physical production cycle, where possible automating the steps that take blank media through to a finished item.
