working in combination with a robot.

Leo Petrokonis, business development manager, packaging industry, for automation supplier Rockwell Automation Inc., Milwaukee, weighs in with another impressive percentage. “Recently, I was looking over some surveys of manufacturers, and one from 2008 particularly struck me. It reported that over 40 percent of the packaging OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) surveyed are either offering robots today or are going to offer them in the next several years.”

In line with those figures, and in expectation that vision will play an increasingly important part in this growing list of applications, Rockwell has launched initiatives that both mirror and help expand the trends discussed above. These include an “add-on profile” with its vision partner Cognex Corp., Natick, Mass. The idea is to allow easy, quickly implemented communication between Rockwell systems and Cognex vision systems. “It allows a Cognex system to appear to our system as if it is just another device on Ethernet, so we don’t have to write special software to communicate with it. This, coupled with the fact that the vision software has gotten easier to configure, allows vision-aided robotics to be much easier to use in packaging, with quicker installation, start-up and troubleshooting.”

Another area the company is focusing on is expanding line controller capabilities. “One of the recent advances has been the integration of robot control directly into the line controller rather than having a separate dedicated-purpose robot controller,” notes Bob Hirschinger, product manager for Logix Motion at Rockwell Automation. This higher level of integration, he says, helps reduce the cost and improve the productivity of a packaging operation, and makes it significantly easier to maintain and support the robot.

The trends, then, would seem to be clear: greater use of vision-aided robots in packaging, increased integration among the various components of the system, and a continuing emphasis on making the systems easier to implement and easier to use. And the high level of product differentiation that provides such fertile ground for the growth of vision-assisted robotic applications shows no signs of abating in the near future.

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