| Flexible Feeders are bulk feeders that do not fully singulate, orient and present parts. Instead, the feeders present the parts to a vision-equipped robotic manipulator, which locates any parts in the correct orientation and then acquires them from their free state.
Flexible Feeders work off the principle that, when randomly arranged, a certain percentage of the parts will assume the desired orientation. The wrongly oriented parts are then recirculated through the feeder, hopefully assuming the correct orienation on the next pass through. If coins were fed through a flexible feeder, the "heads" might correspond to the correct orientation, and get acquired, while the "tails" would pass back to the randomizer, possibly getting reoriented to "heads" on the next try.
At Crux, we use a flexible feeder based on two sliding-bed conveyors. One conveyor is constructed as a hopper, with cleats on the belt. The other acts as the feed conveyor. Parts trickle from the hopper onto the feed conveyor, where they are carried under a fixed camera. A robotic manipulator, equipped with machine vision, then finds the parts in the correct orientation, and acquires them for assembly. The unused parts are then returned to the hopper, where they are re-radomized.
Our first flexible feeder of this configuration went into production in 1997, and has maintained an effective assembly rate of 20 parts per minute since that time.
Benefits
- Flexible and reconfigurable;
- Can be used for parts that cannot be bowl fed;
- Can be used where parts of different geometry must be handled by the same equipment.
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