Estimating Throughput for a Flexible Part Feeder

To rapidly feed industrial parts on an assembly line, Carlisle et. al. [4] proposed a flexible part feeding system that drops parts on a flat conveyor belt, determines their pose (position and orientation) with a vision system and uses a high-speed scara robot to move them to a pallet in a desired pose. Such a feeder can be rapidly configured and reconfigured to handle a variety of parts. To facilitate rapid set-up of assembly lines, a simulator can provide visualization and realistic timing estimates. This paper focuses on estimating feeder throughput, which determines the “heartbeat” of an assembly line.