Pitney Bowes Inc.

Peter K Zanger

Perry A Pierce

Edward M Ifkovits

Robert Marcinik

Egbert E Most

Stephen C Nunnally

Bernard J Christ

A collation control mechanism is used to transfer a collation from a dual accumulator to an exit nip of a collation machine. The collation control mechanism has a middle drum and two side rollers to form an upper nip and a lower nip. The drum is caused to rotate alternately in a clockwise direction and in a counter-clockwise direction for transferring a collation from the upper bay and the lower bay, respectively, to the exit nip. A motor is used to drive the drum in both the clockwise and counter-clockwise direction. A coupling mechanism including two sets of one-way clutches is used to engage the motor to the upper and lower rollers of the exit nip so that the upper roller is caused to rotate only in the counter-clockwise direction while the lower roller is cause to rotate only in the clockwise direction.

Document stream merging method and apparatus

A method and system are invented for adaptively and automatically retuning a closed-loop servo motor that is operating within normal limits. A first active set of configurable tuning constants is assigned to the servo motor, and motor performance is periodically measured to determine if performance is outside a retuning threshold, in which case the active set of configurable tuning constants is replaced by selecting a replacement set of tuning constants from a finite group of discrete predesigned sets of tuning constants. Actual performance of the servo motor is remeasured, and this process is repeated if the performance remains outside the retuning threshold. The predesigned sets of tuning constants are derived and stored in the servo motor software, typically as a result of pretesting the servo motor model by the manufacturer, for example using manual retuning.

Adaptive servo motor retuning method and system

In a microprocessor-controlled apparatus a plurality of event vector tables and a plurality of event action blocks are defined and stored in memory to provide a determined set of actions to be performed in correspondence to activation by respective determined events. A profile interpreter processes action function sequences from these tables and commands the corresponding actions, sets a corresponding event-occurred flag and thereafter commands other actions and manipulates the flag by operation of respective profile action functions associated with the respective operations of the apparatus. The levels of operation may be arranged hierarchically so that additional modules may be added at a lower level without altering the control functions provided at the higher level. All of the primitive functions that can be realistically supported by the device controller are preferably included in the base software. Aggregate functions may be designed to support complex I/O functions such as scanning. In accordance with the invention these functions are activated by device profiles that are downloaded by the system software to each device controller during application initialization. These profiles can also be hard-coded into a source-format include-file to accommodate a standalone operation without download capability. Mailpiece tracking is included in the method.

Method for controlling electro-mechanical devices

A method for providing motion information for a motor controller is accomplished by defining a determined set of motion parameters for describing a desired motion in terms of encoder position data. The parameters are stored for use in calculating the desired motion profile of the motor during the various motion segments of the desired profile as the motor is being driven. The method saves on required memory storage for all the various motor profiles typically used in devices such as inserters since only the parameters used in calculating must be stored. A flag field is also provided to enable the microprocessor to determine which of the segments is being generated.

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Naugatuck, CT, United States of America

Peter K Zanger