Development and testing of a brush feeder

Some manufacturing processes and many packaging operations require oriented and aligned parts. When a high feed rate cannot be obtained by human operators or when sophisticated vision systems, able to guide the picking operations, are too expensive or too complex for a specific application, a different approach to solve the problem is necessary. In this paper a brush feeding system based on tilted brushes is presented. It allows the controlled motion and the correct alignment of products different in shape, weight and surface roughness. The brush feeder is analyzed both from a theoretical and experimental point of view.