USPTO grants Solystic patent for robotized postal sorting machine

An illustrative figure from the USPTO filing.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Solystic a patent for a postal sorting machine that features a “robotized arm”.

The patent, which was filed on 16 December 2015 and published by USPTO on 30 January this year, describes a postal sorting machine that “comprises a sorting conveyor suitable for transporting postal articles in series past sorting outlets and a postal article feed unit having a magazine for loosely storing postal articles to be sorted and a separator that has a robotized arm and a vision sensor and that is suitable for picking up the postal articles to be sorted one-by-one from the magazine and for putting them on the sorting conveyor while placing them in series at constant pitch”.

In addition, the sorting conveyor has “a flat conveyor that slopes sideways to form a jogging edge against which the postal articles are jogged by gravity”.

The patent added: “The basic idea of the invention is to unload the heterogeneous postal articles of the small parcel or packet type arriving at the sorting center loosely into a feed magazine of the sorting machine, and to use a robotized arm as a separator, the arm coming to pick up the heterogeneous postal articles one-by-one from the magazine via a pneumatic pickup.”