Robots can receive the supplier pallets, store the cases, and build every customer order. But even in highly automated warehouses, one step has held out before the dock: stretch wrapping. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, recorded on the show floor at Pack Expo International 2026 in Chicago, Aaron Hand talks with Ciaran Donnelly, global business development manager at Lantech, the company that invented the stretch wrapper in 1972, about closing that last gap.

Donnelly takes us inside Lantech’s AMR-integrated stretch wrapping project with Block One Automation at Del Papa Distributing, where autonomous mobile robots carry order-picked pallets straight into the wrapper and on to the dock. Getting to autonomous stretch wrapping took more than good hardware. A human operator can improvise when something goes wrong, but a robot needs every pain point worked out before the first pallet moves. Donnelly is candid about what that meant in practice, from logic bugs found at installation to Friday-night phone calls and Sunday-morning software updates, and why a wrapper designed from the ground up for AMRs comes “as close to plug and play as I’ve ever seen in automatic equipment.”

If your automation plans stop short of the shipping dock, this conversation makes the case that the end of the line deserves as much attention as everything that comes before it.

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Walk the floor at Pack Expo and you’ll see fillers, conveyors, robots, and palletizers, each impressive on its own. But a collection of standalone machines doesn’t make a production line. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, recorded on the show floor at Pack Expo International 2026 in Chicago, Aaron Hand talks with Dean Elkins, consumer products segment leader at Mission Design & Automation, about what it takes to connect the dots.

Elkins, who spent three decades at Yaskawa and has chaired both A3 and MHI’s Robotics Group, explains why the automation buying journey looks different for consumer products companies, which often lack deep in-house engineering staffs and are driven by labor shortages, scrap reduction, and SKU proliferation. He describes how rainbow packs and private labeling are pushing flexible automation upstream from end of line into primary and secondary packaging, how AI-driven vision and hygienic IP69K robots are closing the gap between processing and packaging, and how collaborative robots (cobots) are here to stay.

If you’re weighing your next automation project and trying to figure out where the gaps are on your line, this episode offers a practical integrator’s perspective from one of the industry’s most experienced robotics leaders.

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“Now tactile is an array of information that gives you insight into the contact mechanics between two objects.”

Pressure is a scalar value. Force is a vector. Tactile sensing, says Pressure Profile Systems founder Dr. Jae Son, is something else entirely — a map of contact across an entire surface, the same sense humans rely on to pick up a coffee cup without crushing it, and one that most robots still don’t have.

In this episode of “Manufacturing Matters,” TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin sits down with Dr. Son, PPS’s Dr. Charles MacLeod, and longtime robotics industry leader Stu Shepherd (Shepherd Solutions) to unpack why tactile sensing is finally getting its due — driven by humanoids and robots working in unstructured environments where fixed, pre-programmed grasps no longer cut it. The conversation covers PPS’s 65-point Tactile Glove (used both to collect human grasp data for robot training and, oddly, fitted directly onto robotic hands), and two very different medical spinouts: a radiation-free breast exam device now shown to outperform mammograms, and a new sensor for knee-replacement surgery that finally gives surgeons data instead of feel.

Shepherd brings the industry-veteran perspective: Grip force has long been over-engineered because robots couldn’t tell how they were gripping something, and tactile data opens the door to lighter, smarter grippers. Dr. Son also pushes back on humanoid-robot hype, arguing the bigger near-term opportunity is smarter automation broadly, and walks through a very literal use case: giving assembly robots the ability to feel whether a connector clicked into place — something factory-floor noise often makes impossible to hear.

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