International Business Machines Corporation

Daniel A Barela

Mark A Beran

Roger D Shepherd

Louis A Bustamante

Ronald E Reese

Cecil M McDonald

Sheet feeder having adaptive mechanism for assuring dependable automatic operation when the stack of sheets to be fed consists of sheets having varying thicknesses and weights. In a sheet feeder having pickers to move a document from the top of a stack of sheets supported by a moveable table to a feed-in position, the latter possibly including a vacuum belt for moving the document, sensors supply signals to indicate a sheet has been picked. After moving the pickers and table to initial positions, the controller moves the picker to a predetermined reference position. If a sheet is picked above or below the predetermined initial position, the position of the table is adjusted accordingly. In a second embodiment in a recirculating automatic sheet feeder, the table is initially positioned then after feeding the sheets from the stack once, it is initialized at a second predetermined position depending on the number of documents in the stack and on the position of the table prior to picking the documents a second time.

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Boulder, CO, United States of America

Daniel A Barela