Highly flexible feeding of components for automatic assembly. The SyFA module

A new highly flexible components feeder used in automatic assembly lines is presented. Flexibility is gained by the joint use of a vision system and a vibrating tooling plate which simultaneously acts as a separating and an orienting mechanism. A detailed mathematical modeling of the dynamics is derived. The modeling fully takes into account the random nature of the mechanisms which are used to extract out of a bulk of randomly oriented parts, those exhibiting a prescribed orientation.