News

The Yaskawa exhibit at the 2016 Pack Expo won’t lack for eye-catching attractions. There will be plenty of action in booth S-2179 of the packaging industry trade show, as Yaskawa robots, servo systems and variable frequency drives fill the large exhibit space with demonstrations of the latest in picking, packing and palletizing technology.

While there is plenty to draw visitors’ attention, some of the biggest innovations won’t be immediately visible to the naked eye. A prominent feature will be Yaskawa’s new Sigma-7 servo systems, the latest generation of servos from a company that has been manufacturing servo-driven motion automation devices since the early 1970s.

“Strictly from looking at them, you might not realize that Sigma-7 makes a major step forward,” noted Jeff Pike, Yaskawa’s Director of Motion Group Marketing. “They were designed to be an easy direct replacement for our existing servo products, yet in terms of performance they are like nothing else that has gone before.” Sigma-7 offers twice the frequency response bandwidth and 16x better encoder resolution, plus a 20% reduction in motor size that enables the new product to fit into a wider range of existing machine designs. These improvements can lead to a significant improvement in Overall Equipment Effectiveness, an increasingly important metric for packaging industry professionals.

Another notable product advancement will be hiding inside control cabinets all over the Yaskawa exhibit. Some of Yaskawa’s most innovative robotic motion will be controlled by the MP3300iec, a machine controller for servo motion that is also capable of controlling virtually any type of robotic motion as well. MP3300iec is also able to simultaneously control robots, servo axes and variable frequency drives, using the standard conventions of IEC 61131-3 programming that are already familiar to many packaging industry engineers. In addition to running some of the articulated robots in the Yaskawa exhibit, visitors will see a demonstration of MP3300iec’s capability to control gantry robots and other non-standard robotic mechanisms.

“We are looking forward to having the packaging industry see what we’re bringing to Pack Expo,” said Pike. “It’s one thing to tell people about improvements in performance, new capabilities and advancements in automation effectiveness, and quite another to let them see it in action first hand.”

Visit www.yaskawa.com/packaging for free registration compliments of Yaskawa!