On November 18, manroland’s AutomaticPlateLoading (APL) took first prize in the Print Technology category of the German Printing Industry Innovation Awards, held in Stuttgart.
manroland states that a key push behind the development of its APL system was to help newspaper printers deal with the growing trend of split runs, which naturally creates a production environment in need of fast plate changing.
“We oriented our features totally on market and customer needs,” said manroland CEO Gerd Finkbeiner. “Receiving this award from industry specialists shows that our products meet printing companies’ requirements exactly.”
The APL system uses a 4-axis robotic arm built by the KUKA Robot Group, which has a positioning accuracy of 0.01 millimeters. The robot was co-developed by the KUKA Robot Group and integrated by manroland in the APL system. Today, more than a dozen autoprint newspaper presses with well over 150 APL robots have been ordered.
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