Guillotine Traps
Anthony Levandowski, K "Gopal" Gopalakrishnan, Francis Hsu, Ken Goldberg
Large manufacturing operations rely on machines, called part feeders,
to orient parts before they are assembled. Vibratory bowl feeders customized
for each part are the most common mechanism used for automated part feeding.
To help automate the design of bowl feeders we propose a new class of traps,
called guillotine traps. Guillotine traps are practical for industrial part
feeding because they are simple to manufacture. The advantage of guillotine
traps over previously considered traps is that guillotine trap can improve
bowl feeder througput by allowing the desired part orientation to be chosen.
We give an algorithm that will generate a guillotine trap to feed a given
part in a given orientation or report that no such trap exists. We have
created a java-based design tool that generates guillotine traps for any
polygonal two-dimensional part.
[Research Paper under construction].
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