Tell us about your company.

Piab provides smart solutions for the automated world, helping thousands of end users and machine producers in e-commerce logistics, food, pharma, automotive and other manufacturing industries to improve energy-efficiency, productivity and working environments. With almost 500 employees, Piab is a global organization, serving customers in almost 70 countries from a network of subsidiaries and distributors. By leveraging the ongoing technological development in automation and robotics, and targeting high-growth segments and geographies, Piab's vision is to become the global leader in gripping and moving solutions

Your company will be exhibiting at PACK Expo, what is it that makes this an important event for your company?

It is an opportunity to showcase our company’s smart gripping and moving solutions to help our customers be more efficient and productive while saving energy in the automated world.  It’s the only show this year in the United States to showcase our complete company’s offering for vacuum automation (pumps, cups, etc.), vacuum conveying, ergonomic handling and robotic gripping applications.

What makes your booth a must visit for PACK Expo Attendees?

Piab is proud to introduce to Pack Expo the new soft gripping tool piSOFTGRIP®, developed especially with food industry automation in mind. The vacuum-based soft gripper will grip sensitive and lightweight objects of odd geometries and/or an unusual surface. Bin-picking of small irregularly shaped objects, such as toys, is another potential application. 

piSOFTGRIP® has three gripping fingers and a vacuum cavity, all made in one piece, resulting in a simple and robust product. As it is vacuum-driven, the gripping force is easily adjusted and controlled by the applied vacuum level.

Piab’s piLIFT® SMART represents a paradigm shift as the market’s first Industry 4.0 ready vacuum lifter. piLIFT® SMART takes ergonomic vacuum lifting to a new and higher level, essential for meeting our customers’ needs.  Smart data features based on internet connectivity enable Piab’s piLIFT® SMART vacuum lifter to deliver on the promises of Industry 4.0. Sensing and monitoring movements and responding quickly to user intentions, the user-friendly vacuum lifter will lift and weigh loads simultaneously, collect and log data, making process statistics and analyses immediately accessible to the user through web platform log-in.

The Changeover Champion taking vacuum conveying to a new level.  Change materials six times faster with piFLOW®p SMART. Changes that would normally take one hour in a conventional vacuum conveyor take only 10 minutes in piFLOW®p SMART.  The perfect performance and productivity promoter, piFLOW®p SMART is the world’s first self-optimizing vacuum conveyor. Integrated with smart software and sensor technology, it is the ultimate choice for processors handling many different materials or those that need to make frequent changes.  piFLOW®p SMART uses machine learning to automatically tune the process, resulting in a flawless flow of materials.

PACK Expo has many educational sessions, forums & Demo’s, is your company involved in any of them this year?

Piab products will be used in the Robotics Zone booth N-850, new this year for Pack Expo Las Vegas.  In partnership with Universal Robots and Allied Technology, Piab products will be handling food objects for PACK for a Purpose:Robots Fighting Hunger in collaboration with Blessings in a Backpack. The charity benefits children facing food insecurity across Las Vegas and elsewhere in the United States.

When you get a chance to walk the exhibit hall floor yourself, what is it you will be most interested to see?  Any educational sessions, pavilions etc. you plan on attending? 

It is always interesting to see the newest cutting-edge technologies in the packaging industry that can’t be seen anywhere else.

The factory floor is undertaking rapid advancements, be it automation, robotics, machine vision or data.  Automation Technology is a huge part for many manufacturers, give us an idea on how your company and product is being utilized now in the smart factory.

Piab’s piSMART® – more intelligent and cloud-connected versions of the company's most advanced vacuum technology products, kitted out for smart factories. piCOMPACT®23 SMART is one of the first products.  Fully integrated control functions for on/off, blow, vacuum sensing and diagnostics.  IO-Link provides smart data to support predictive maintenance.  Now with piLIFT® SMART for ergonomic handling and piFLOW® p SMART, intelligent vacuum conveying.

Give us your thoughts on what the future holds for manufacturers and automation technology.

In some respects, the future is now with a large amount of current smart-technology Industry 4.0 products communicating with each other providing for great efficiencies.  More user-friendly apps for mobile phones and other handheld devices gathering data for Industry 4.0 factories, where processes and components are automatically guided, controlled and verified.

The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of RoboticsTomorrow

Piab Inc.

Piab provides smart solutions for the automated world, helping thousands of end users and machine producers in e-commerce logistics, food, pharma, automotive and other manufacturing industries to improve energy-efficiency, productivity and working environments. By leveraging the ongoing technological development in automation and robotics, and targeting high-growth segments and geographies, Piab's vision is to become the global leader in gripping and moving solutions.

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