Manipulation and orientation of soft products with controlled air jets using distributed microcontroller based fuzzy logic control

The need for new handling systems in the snack food industry has widely been recognised. There are two basic problems when handling flexible packaged products: damage limitation and the control of dynamically altering objects in real time. To overcome the problems, the concept of closed loop controlled air handling has been introduced. Randomly aligned packets are received onto a transport mechanism and are manipulated into the assembly position using multiple intelligently controlled high speed air jets. Simple error and change in error fuzzy control has been successfully implemented using the fuzzy rule base