Shandong New Beiyang Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Weihai New Beiyang Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

Deyi Li

Tianxin Jiang

Yang Liu

Jian Li

Chunguang Zhang

Botao Wang

Peng Tao

Hongming Li

Juntao Liu

An automatic vending machine includes a cabinet, a plurality of item columns, a pickup port and a delivery apparatus, and the delivery apparatus includes a hopper and a hopper drive mechanism. An item dispensing method of the automatic vending machine includes: determining, according to items to be purchased, all of item combination manners having a lowest number of item dispensing operations as candidate item combination manners; determining all of pickup manners for picking up items in each of the candidate item combination manners; determining all of item dispensing paths in one-to-one correspondence to all of pickup manners of all of the candidate item combination manners; and selecting, from all of the item dispensing paths, an item dispensing path having a highest efficiency as a target item dispensing path, and controlling, based on the target item dispensing path, the hopper to dispense items.

Automatic vending machine, and item dispensing method for same

Disclosed are a vending machine and a method of detecting height of a storage column. The vending machine may determine whether a sensor squarely faces the front end surface of the level plate of a storage column by detecting the type of an output signal of the sensor. When the sensor squarely faces the front end surface of the level plate of the storage column, the height of the level plate of the storage column may be obtained based on a height difference between the sensor and the bearing surface of a bucket and the height of the bucket. Thus, according to the height of the level plate of the storage column, the bearing surface of the bucket and the upper edge of the front end surface of the level plate of the storage column lie in the same level when dispensing an item.

Vending machine and method for detecting height of storage column

Growing community of inventors

Shandong, China

Deyi Li