Plastics & Rubber World - May/June 2019 - 22

AUTOMATION

›› Continued from page 21

Industry 4.0 is not
a ﬁxed, deﬁned
parameter
Jean-Michel Renaudeau, Sepro Group

oﬀers, from moulding machines and related ancillaries, through to robotics, are all
4.0-compliant. In practise, this means the
full installation is delivering data to support further process optimisation.
Wittmann Battenfeld recently bought
a shareholding in Italian company IceFlex, developers of the TEMI Plast 4.0
system, speciﬁcally designed to support
analysis of plastic moulding operations.
Hill says the MES allows plastics practitioners to collect and analyse data from
across virtually all process operations,
giving a clearer picture of overall eﬃciency.
"We believe we are the only company
that can gather data from the machine
and all related hardware, including robotics," says Hill.
At Sepro, Jean-Michel Renaudeau says
the company is addressing Industry 4.0
on a customer-by-customer basis. "Industry 4.0 is not a ﬁxed, deﬁned parameter.
Within that there's better digitalisation,
better management and quality through
smart data. But for each customer, there
is a unique approach, not all will have the
same deﬁnition," he says.
But within this, Renaudeau says there
are distinct trends related to diversiﬁcation of robotics being used for plastic injection moulding. "We're seeing two clear
tendencies," he explains. "One, is to make
a robot which runs the same program, the
same cycle, 24-hours per day. That's fast
cycle, high-volume production. The robots
are behind safety barriers, due to the high
speeds, a person cannot interact with the
robot.
"The second is where the worker
should be supported by the robot. This is
part of the assembly process to complete
the product. These are cobots, where the
robots are slower and they take smaller

SCARA robot at Vision Plastics
positions lens inserts for application
payloads, around 10 to 15kg. This is a new
area of automation," he says.
A further step is the capability of controlling robots via a single interface. This is
not just for machines delivered by Sepro.
The goal is to achieve a situation where
any moulding machine and any robotic
installation can be easily connected, no
matter the supplier. Renaudeau says this
is an extension of the Sepro machine control interface, which should support 'easy'
connections.
"This is the spirit of Industry 4.0," Renaudeau continues. "Where you have different machines, diﬀerent environments,
and you can connect them all. Normally,
six-axis and Cartesian robots are competitors. In the world of Sepro, they will be
friends. Industry 4.0 is very technologically
intense, but we always come back validating the investment. That always comes
down to eﬃciency driving better quality
and better cost."

LOW-COST COMPETITORS

Wittmann Battenfeld QuickEdit - low-cost robotics do not oﬀer this ﬂexibility in
programming

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Both Wittmann Battenfeld and Sepro
Group are positioned as premium providers of top-quality automation solutions.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is
a wave of low-cost automation providers
based in south-east Asia and China which
are looking to take share away from these
high-end players.
Barry Hill says the oﬀering from these
new companies doesn't compare to what
he brings to the table. "The robots from
the Far East generally use what's called

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Plastics & Rubber World - May/June 2019

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