Food & Beverage Packaging, September 2014
Robots in Packaging: The Future is Now

Robots in the packaging industry are no longer a luxury to science-fiction future but a necessity for companies to grow their business. – By Chris Follows, contributing writer

Today’s competitive packaging market requires companies to automate in order to succeed and to take things up to an even further level. Companies are more often looking to the field of robotics to get them there. While the term ‘robot’ owes its origin to the Czech writer Karel Capek and his 1921 play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), he says his brother Josef actually came up with the term, ‘roboti’ as a play on the Czech word ‘robata’ which means ‘serf labor’ or ‘hard work’.

Often, the terms ‘robotics’ and ‘robots’ are used interchangeably, and in truth even the manufacturers of
such things are guilty of it, but it is generally accepted that robotics is the term used to describe the field of
robots and its uses. For the purposes of the packaging industry, companies tend to look upon robots as programmable, automatic machines that replace specific human motions. These motions are difficult for people to perform as they more than often result in repetitive motion injuries.

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