This paper describes a manipulation primitive called toppling—knocking a part over. We derive the mechanical conditions for toppling and describe two applications to conveyor-based parts feeding. Toppling complements previous approaches to conveyor-plane feeding, allowing full three-dimensional parts feeding on a constant-speed conveyor.

We consider a sensorless approach to feeding parts on a conveyor belt using pins (rigid barriers) to topple parts into desired orientations. Given the n-sided 2D convex projection of an extruded polygonal part, its center of mass (COM), and coefficients of friction, we develop an O(n) algorithm to compute the toppling graph, a new data structure that represents the mechanics of toppling includi...

One of the most conventional toppling instabilities is the block-flexural toppling failure that occurs in civil and mining engineering projects. In this kind of failure, some rock columns are broken due to tensile bending stresses, and the others are overturned due to their weights, and finally, all of the blocks topple together. A specific feature of spheroidal weathering is the rounding of th...

The Bethe ansatz method and an iterative procedure based on detailed balance are used to obtain exact results for an asymmetric avalanche process on a ring. The average velocity of particle flow, v, is derived as a function of the toppling probabilities and the density of particles, rho. As rho increases, the system shows a transition from intermittent to continuous flow, and v diverges at a cr...

One of the most important instabilities of rock slopes is toppling failure. Among the types of toppling failure, block-flexural failures are more common instability which occurs in nature. In this failure, some rock blocks break because of tensile stresses, and some overturn under their weights, and next to all of them topple together. Physical and theoretical modeling of this failure is studie...

This paper presents some simple ideas about domino gates. Domino gates are implementations of logical operations using toppling dominoes to represent the movement of information (bits). The actively toppling domino represents a logic one, and absence of toppling represents logic zero. The domino model can be used as a representation of single-shot wave gates in unconstrained media, such as sub-...