Pack Expo 2013: The Most Dazzling Machines we Saw, Caught on Video

Originally Published on FoodDive.com by Davide Savenije

Packaging isn't just about what consumers see when they buy food at the supermarket. It preserves products, seals out contaminants and convey messages to the consumer. But how familiar are you with what goes on behind the scenes? And do you know what other companies are using?

At Pack Expo 2013, Food Dive saw demonstrations of machines that do food packaging. From super-fast and ultra-precise robot arms to robots that can distinguish among different shapes, sizes and colors, these Pack Expo's most interesting packaging machines in motion:

IDENTIFICATION, PLEASE
Company: Kawasaki

These Kawasaki robots can identify and distinguish individual products by their color, shape and imagery. The robot software hooks up to a standard, color 2D camera. The camera sends raw image data to the software, which then compares each product to the images in its database.

Jonathan Spencer, mechanical engineer at Kawasaki Robotics North America, told Food Dive about the circulating loop on display below.

"We created a database of Welch's bags: red, blue and purple," he explained. "The robot looks for the outline of the Welch's logo and, once it finds the logo, it looks for the color." The robot has thus identified what product it is and then executes the corresponding command associated with the product. In this demonstration, the red, blue and purple bags placed into a cardboard box in three separate, color-coded stacks.