At Italy's packaging and processing trade show, IPACK-IMA, staged last week in Milan, PKN caught up with Cama Group MD Alessandro Rocca, who will be attending AUSPACK next week.
Stopping by the busy Cama Group stand at IPACK-IMA, it was plain to see here is a company with a lot to offer the industry on the secondary packaging front. Until recently, Cama Group had an Australian subsidiary, but as MD Alessandro Rocca tells PKN, that is about to change with the establishment of a partnership with a local packaging machinery company.
At AUSPACK, we will find out who the new partner is, and what this will mean for the business.
Meanwhile, at IPACK-IMA, the company exhibited a fully integrated robotic solution, with a small footprint and a battery of 12 Triaflex robots working in co-flow, capable of packaging about 1000 products per minute.
These robots feature an anti-collision system, which allows them to work in a very small space without interfering with each other's functions: two product loading lines, therefore, one on the right and one on the left, with various configurations.
The lines have an advanced vision system, which allows them to recognise product shapes and do quality checks. They are also equipped with an integrated digital-twin simulation system, the flagship of the first phase of Industry 4.0, according to Cama.
The company says that even before the machine was produced, the focus was on preventive design, with dedicated engineering that allowed the replication of packaging and product behaviour on the line. All of this is visualised via a large HMI touch screen, mounted directly on the machine and which allows you to see how the system was designed at the virtual engineering level. The digital twin helps to simulate a real production cycle and helps to prevent problems that, if discovered during assembly and testing, can be a serious problem. The analysis of behaviours, loads, trajectories and robots delivers a strong advantage, Cama says.
Cama's machines have also been enhanced with Industry 4.0 augmented reality packages, but with one more feature than the robotic application mentioned above. The machines show via a smart tablet, all stages of maintenance, changeover and spare parts. The information, which was previously accessible in the paper manual, is now displayed on screen via QR code – a user-friendly solution that almost completely replaces the traditional manual, and effectively supports staff training.
