Adaptive Dispensing System
A parametric, gravity-fed dispenser meant to singulate and count mixed products out of a bin — the case for dispensing over robotic picking, tested by building one.
- Role
- Solo design
- Year
- 2026 — present
- Tools
- SolidWorks
Nothing is built yet. This page is a live log of an ongoing design — it will fill in with geometry, prototypes and failures as they happen, rather than appearing finished after the fact.
Product sits in a bin. The system singulates it, counts out a specified number of items, and releases them. The whole geometry is parametric, driven by global variables in SolidWorks, so adapting it to a different product envelope means changing a handful of numbers rather than remodeling the assembly.
The point is to do a job that fulfillment centers currently throw robotic arms at, using gravity and geometry instead.
Nothing physical yet. Right now the work is the parametric skeleton — writing the equations that hold every dimension in relationship to the others, so that when one product dimension changes the rest of the geometry follows without breaking.
That is deliberately the first problem rather than the fun one. A chute tuned by hand for one package shape is a dead end; the whole premise depends on the geometry being derivable.
It came out of a piece I wrote comparing robotic-arm picking, A-frame dispensing, and cube storage. The argument was that dispensing scales more cheaply than picking, and that once you do that, replenishment becomes the next bottleneck. This is me testing the first half of it.