Study and Simulation of an Under-Actuated Smart Surface for Material Flow Handling

Smart surfaces are becoming more and popular in the field of intralogistics, as they combine great flexibility with easy reprogrammability. Pursuing this trend, following article proposes a modular surface to perform handling tasks, such sorting, stopping, or slowing down material flows. Differently from current technology, used is under-actuated, thus, it exploits speed, already possessed by object, gravity perform, simplified hardware, for aforementioned tasks. In practice, these actions completed using an array rotors, which only direction rotation axis controlled. Moreover, can assume certain discrete orientations plane, further simplifying design. Thus, what created controllable under-actuated friction field, which, contrast similar existing systems, does not require active driving forces manipulate flow. article, analytic model described, software simulation environment introduced demonstrate its functioning. addition, examples down, stopping operations validation itself presented.