Patent ID: 6988350

Claim:
A packaging system, comprising: a receiving and dropping assembly comprising one or more doors that are displaceable between a holding configuration and a dropping configuration, the doors defining a receptacle in the holding configuration, the receptacle successively receiving, aligning, and holding each of a plurality of articles, and the doors dropping each of the aligned articles being held in the dropping configuration; an output conveyor line receiving the articles dropped by the receiving and dropping assembly; means for controlling the operation of said one or more doors in conjunction with controlled intermittent running of the output conveyor line to cause the dropped articles to be conveyed along the output conveyor line in predetermined arrays and so that, for each array, the articles in the array contact a conveying surface of the output line conveyor and are adjacently positioned with respect to each other along the conveying surface with adjacent articles in the array contacting each other, and so that arrays are spaced apart from each other; and means for picking up the articles or arrays of articles from the output conveyor line and placing the picked up articles in receptacles.