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Vibratory feeders are commonly used in industries for part feeding. There are several factors that affect the conveying velocity of parts on the vibratory feeder. Among these, the critical factors such as excitation frequency, amplitude of vibration, mass of part, co-efficient of friction and Length-towidth (L/W) ratio of the part were considered for experimental studies. The percentage of influence of each factor on conveying velocity was determined through ANOVA. Regression and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models were developed to predict the velocity of prismatic parts on vibratory feeder. Comparison of results with experimental results revealed that ANN was able to predict closer than the regression model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vibratory feeders are commonly used in industries for part feeding. The design of vibratory part feeders is complex and consumes more time. Sensorless part feeding (without the aid of sensors) is further challenging. Berretty et al (2001) discussed a sequence of mechanical barriers which either reject the disoriented parts or reorient the parts to desired orientation. They termed this as 'traps'. In this paper, an inexpensive trap was designed and fabricated for handling brakeliners. The efficiency of the trap was found to be 100% using Markov model as well as experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent problem in manufacturing automation is the accurate and reliable presentation of small parts, in a single specified configuration called preferred orientation, to a work cell. This is often referred to as the "part feeding" problem. Low cost automation is employed to develop the part feeding system for brake liner, a typical asymmetric part. Currently handling of such asymmetric parts is done either manually or by using expensive robot and vision systems. These approaches cumulatively increase the production cost. The proposed low cost part feeder system uses sensor less mechanical devices or barriers such as slot, wiper blade, balcony, edge riser etc. to eliminate or reorient the arbitrary orientation into a preferred orientation which facilitates stacking. A complete set of such mechanical devices is called trap. The orientation with highest probability of occurrence is found using drop test, which is the preferred orientation at the exit of the feeder. A trap is designed to get the preferred orientation at the exit of the feeder. Critical dimensions of the trap were identified and experiments were conducted to optimize them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]