TM Robotics, the official distributor for Shibaura Machine industrial robots in Europe, has confirmed its attendance at Interpack 2023, held on 4 to 10 May, 2023 in Düsseldorf. TM Robotics will present two Shibaura Machine robots, THL500 and TVL700, at the Markem-Imaje stand E58 in hall 8b.

With more than 2,500 exhibitors from 55 countries and over 170,000 visitors, Interpack is the world's largest and most important trade fair for the packaging industry and its related process industries.

In 2017, 74 per cent of all visitors came from abroad and three quarters of these visitors were decision makers in the industry. TM Robotics, in collaboration with Markem-Imaje, will present two Shibaura Machine robots at the event — THL500 and TVL700. The presentation of the two robots comes as part of the complete in-line packaging system, Snack to Go.

"Due to our collaboration with the Ingenieur-Büro Rolf Peters, its partners and  Markem-Imaje, we have the opportunity to demonstrate the SCARA robot THL500 as well as the 6-axis robot TVL700 in operation at the Markem-Imaje stand at Interpack," explained Nigel Smith, managing director at TM Robotics. "As part of a complete system including other components, both robots will fill a snack box, which can afterwards be handed out to visitors at the trade fair. The key point is that our robots are an important component of the complete system."

The  TVL700 is a 6-axis robot with a reach of 700mm and a payload of four kilograms. Its task in the in-line packaging system Snack to Go is to pick up the empty trays and to position them in front of the Markem-Imaje laser. Once the laser marking has been completed, the Shibaura TVL700 will move the tray to an image processing system with a Cognex camera where the laser marking is checked. If the laser marking meets the requirement, the Shibaura Machine TVL700 robot will position the tray at the filling point of the packaging machine.

After this process, the SCARA robot, with an arm length of 500mm and a payload of ten kilograms, comes into operation. It will pick two apples in different varieties from the magazine on the rack and place them in the tray.

The THL500 robot then picks up four different cereal bars, which have been manually placed on the conveyor belt and checked for their properties by a quality image processor, from the conveyor belt and places them in the tray. Finally, the trays will be both printed and packed by a flow-pack machine (see process description).  

If you would like to visit TM Robotics at Interpack 2023, you can register here.