The productivity and efficiency of packaging processes at Kraus Maschinenbau GmbH have been transformed by its close working relationship with Omron. The two companies are already exhibiting the high degree of collaboration that will be essential for workflows in the factory of the future.

As manufacturers progress towards Industry 4.0 (and Packaging 4.0), closer interactions will be needed between both development and technology partners and also between man and machine in the factory. This is why Kraus Maschinenbau has joined forces with Omron to develop an innovative collaborative robot (cobot) project for its packaging environment. A key element of this involves the Omron TM12 cobot, which is used to optimize the automatic feeding of booklets into pharmaceutical packages. The booklets are multi-page, quite extensive inserts that are added to packages for items such as insulin syringes or other medicines.

In the new solution, the booklets are stacked on approximately one-metre long rods (known as traces), and are taken over by the cobot and fed into the system. The Omron TM12 cobot was chosen as the most suitable solution as it has been shown to reduce the need for manual labor, whilst increasing efficiency and minimizing any errors.