Abstract: European researchers point out that since the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, humanity has undergone four iterations of industrial revolutions, and is now entering the era of Industry 5.0.
European researchers point out that since the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, humanity has undergone four iterations of industrial revolutions, and is now entering the era of Industry 5.0.
This concept was officially proposed by the European Commission in 2021 and is defined as placing worker well-being at the core of production, achieving greater prosperity beyond employment and growth through new technologies, while adhering to the planetary boundaries of production. The core is to promote human-machine collaborative work, liberating human labor through collaborative robots, allowing people to focus on creating customer value and building competitive advantages for enterprises.
Secondary packaging equipment manufacturer Cama Group is actively deploying Industry 5.0. Its team believes that the industry is currently undergoing a transformation that reconstructs the boundaries between humans, machines, and artificial intelligence. The company’s R&D director, Massimo Monguzzi, stated: “Relying on the Industry 5.0 concept, we bring humans and machines closer through humanized interfaces, contextualized language, and shared goals, making complex systems simpler.”
Create diverse solutions with AI and GenAI
AI and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) are the key research and development focuses of Cama Group. Monguzzi believes that both can effectively optimize products, processes, and services. Nowadays, they have evolved from exploratory attempts to work tools, with the first application area being software code writing. The team is restructuring programming ideas to automate repetitive operations such as code writing, allowing R&D personnel to focus on high value-added work.
In addition, the team also uses this technology to produce time-consuming technical documents such as operation manuals and technical files. Monguzzi states that integrating GenAI into massive data learning scenarios can greatly improve production efficiency. Relying on the company’s rich assets of thousands of technical files, GenAI can effectively enhance production efficiency, reduce errors, and promote the standardization of technical content. Although it cannot replace manual review, its application value is significant.
To optimize secondary packaging solutions, the R&D department is developing new algorithms to deeply analyze equipment operation data and explore the correlation rules between operating parameters and performance. Monguzzi indicates that production efficiency is closely related to environmental variables such as temperature and humidity. Humidity affects the processing of packaging materials and product quality, while temperature accelerates equipment component wear. Understanding these rules can optimize equipment debugging and proactively prevent failures.
Equipment upgrade plan implemented, five major systems empower production
Cama Group Sales Director Alessandro Rocca introduced that currently, 5 sets of full-process operation systems have been implemented, and 2 functional modules are in advanced research and development stages. This platform is flexible and expandable, suitable for new equipment installation and existing production line transformation. It can improve efficiency, reduce waste and energy consumption, promote sustainable packaging development, and has a short implementation cycle, bringing tangible benefits to customers in specification switching, process quality, and other aspects.
The five major systems that have been implemented are all aimed at empowering production and improving packaging line performance:
1. Augmented Reality Technology: New equipment comes with standard configuration and can also be retrofitted to machines installed in recent years. Operators can scan QR codes with tablets to view step-by-step processes, 3D animations, and other digital content, replacing traditional manuals. This saves time, reduces errors, simplifies operations, and enables virtual mode training without stopping the machine, lowering operational complexity and smoothing the learning curve;
2. Digital Twin: Applied in the early stages of equipment design or specific product line analysis, it simulates the entire process including visual recognition and product grasping. This enables front-loaded design, predicts production rhythm, verifies grasping schemes, and calculates specification impacts without physical prototypes, shortening R&D cycles and reducing error risks;
3. Fully Automatic Specification Switching: Developed to address two major pain points in packaging lines—human error and equipment downtime. Operators only need to select the recipe and press a button; the equipment automatically adjusts parameters. Switching time is at least halved compared to manual operation, which is especially valuable in companies with high employee turnover, as new employees do not need to learn operations from scratch;
4. Fully Automatic Carton Feeding: First showcased at Ipack-IMA in May 2025, collaborative robots grab die-cut cardboard blanks and deliver them to the feeder, eliminating feeder bottlenecks, ensuring continuous feeding, reducing micro-stoppages, and stabilizing production rhythm. The controllable robot operation also protects cardboard quality;
5. Fully Automatic Collaborative Palletizing: Its core advantage is native integrated design. Although the technology is not entirely new to the industry, it can seamlessly and transparently communicate and coordinate with the case packer to achieve efficient operations.
Two major new features are about to be launched, continuing the layout of technology upgrades
Adhering to the concept of continuous iteration of equipment, the Cama Group R&D team is advancing two new planned features that will soon be brought to market. Rocca revealed that one is an advanced Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) system, capable of picking pallets from the warehouse and efficiently transporting them over hundreds of meters to the production line; the other is edge computing technology, which focuses on transforming equipment operation behavior and collected data into practical industry knowledge, bringing dual benefits: customers gain a more stable production process and rapid fault diagnosis, while the company improves design standards through efficient data utilization to create equipment with superior performance.
Source: camagroup
