From the press to the pallet ready for shipment, many handling steps still rely on operators. It is on this part of the production line that Koenig & Bauer is now focusing its development efforts. The German manufacturer has just signed a partnership with RobCo, a Munich-based developer of modular robotic systems, to automate certain handling and transfer tasks in printing and finishing facilities.
The two partners plan to develop applications covering material feeding, transfers between operations, and palletizing.
For Koenig & Bauer, productivity gains today stem less from the presses themselves than from the operations surrounding them. "We focus our development efforts on the postpress sector because, regardless of the industry, it is often at this stage that a shop's capacity is limited by intermediate operations that are still performed manually." , explains Markus Faude, vice president of Factory & Machine Automation at Koenig & Bauer.
The project is based on technologies developed by RobCo, whose robots can be configured without complex programming. The goal is to enable workshops to tailor applications to their needs without having to routinely call on robotics or industrial IT specialists.
"Many automation projects fail not because of robotics itself, but because of its complexity, notes Roman Hölzl, CEO and co-founder of RobCo. That?s exactly where we come in. With our no-code platform, we enable companies to integrate and customize robotic applications into their production processes much more quickly and easily. In collaboration with Koenig & Bauer, we combine in-depth industry knowledge with a flexible automation platform to make robotics accessible to a much wider range of companies and pave the way for more productive and resilient manufacturing processes."
The first installation at a customer site is scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.
