Patent ID: 7597528

Claim:
A method of handling objects, the method comprising the steps of: a) continuously delivering the objects at a generally uniform rate, one at a time, and one after the other with a suction belt in a longitudinal transport direction to a transfer station; b) continuously displacing a conveyor extending longitudinally in the transport direction past and away from the transfer station in the direction at a generally constant transport speed, the conveyor having a row extending longitudinally in the direction of transversely open conveyor cells; c) arresting a cassette defining a row extending longitudinally in the direction of upwardly open stack wells shaped to receive the objects and having a common floor in the transfer station in an upstream stack-forming position underneath the suction belt while the suction belt delivers the objects to the transfer station; d) detecting objects in the station by a sensor at each of the stack wells and stopping a respective one of the objects above each of the stack wells of the arrested cassette by engagement with a respective abutment above each of the stack wells in accordance with an output of the respective sensor; e) engaging each of the stopped objects with a respective vertically effective knockout tool to separate the stopped object from the belt in accordance with an output of the respective sensor and thereby dropping each of the stopped objects into the respective well of the arrested cassette, the knockout tools operating synchronously with the suction belt so that the objects are separated generally simultaneously from the suction belt by the respective knockout tools so they drop into the respective stack wells ; f) lowering the floor of the cassette each time objects are dropped into the wells by a distance generally equal to a vertical height of one of the objects; g) repeating steps d) through f) while the cassette is arrested in the upstream stack-forming position until there is a stack of a predetermined number of the objects in each of the wells; and h) thereafter displacing the cassette longitudinally downstream out of the upstream stack-forming position in the direction synchronously with the conveyor at the transport speed while simultaneously pushing all of the stacks of objects in the wells transversely of the direction out of the wells into the cells of the conveyor.