It’s no Grand Illusion—Styx will be the headliner for the annual PACK Gives BACK benefit concert at Pack Expo 2022.
Benefit organizers stayed close to home by inviting Styx, which was founded in Chicago in the 1970s, to play at the benefit on Mon., Oct. 24 at McCormick Place. The PMMI Foundation provides financial support for packaging and processing education throughout the U.S and Canada. Since its inception in 1998, the PMMI Foundation has given more than $2.3 million to strengthen the workforce within the packaging and processing industry, according to a press release.
PACK Gives BACK guests will begin the evening with a networking session at 4:30 p.m. Styx will perform at 5:30 p.m. and will feature such classic hits as “Come Sail Away,” “Too Much Time On My Hands” and “Lady”.
Concert tickets are $95 each. A 10-for-9 deal allows customers to purchase 10 tickets for the price of 9. Rockwell Automation is the title sponsor. To buy tickets and for more information, click here.
At the other end of the industry timeline, the PMMI Emerging Leaders Network will host an evening event for young professionals, sponsored by Beckhoff Automation, on Mon., Oct. 24 from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. at Punch Bowl Social in downtown Chicago. A PACK EXPO International badge is required for entry. Young engineers can RSVP here.
What’s New at Pack Expo: Robotics in Packaging
More than 2,000 exhibitors will display the latest innovations in robotics for the packaging and consumer packaged goods applications. Among this year’s innovations on the show floor will be:
In Booth N-6236, KUKA Robotics will demonstrate its expanded robotic portfolio with the addition of Hygienic Machines (HM) and Hygienic Oil (HO) robots. This wide array of products allows today’s food processing companies to apply robots to tasks considered difficult, if not impossible, to automate.
For fully automated palletizing/depalletizing, KUKA will demonstrate its KR IONTEC medium payload robot mated with a robotic pick-and-place solution. The KR IONTEC will be integrated with 3D-vision to detect stationary items with rectangular surfaces and determine their position, orientation and size for picking. The KR IONTEC is suitable for a vast array of industrial applications including handling, packing and palletizing.
The ABB Robotics Item Picker that includes the ABB Artificial Intelligence solution will be on display at Booth S-3574. The item picker helps customer automate order picking and sorter induction operations, and fulfills ABB’s vision of a fully automated warehouse, combining automated storage with automated order picking.
ABB’s internally developed AI Solution provides accuracy in picking items from unstructured scenery and a high throughput application, achieving peak pick rates up to 1,500 items per hour. Advanced software leveraging artificial intelligence allows the robot to learn and adapt to a wide variety of items including cuboids, cylinders, pouches, blisters and random shapes, as found in electronics, pharma, healthcare, cosmetics and other consumer product industries.
Predictive Maintenance: Moving Past the Hype
Where do CPG companies stand in their usage of predictive maintenance? Find out in this infographic from PMMI.