Patent ID: 7249762

Claim:
A system for feeding and transporting documents, each document having a leading edge and a trailing edge, the system comprising: a feeder stage including a hopper assembly and a feeder wherein the feeder acts to feed documents singly, in order, from a stack of documents in the hopper assembly, the hopper assembly including a hopper floor having a near end at the feeder and a far end away from the feeder, the hopper floor carrying the document stack, and the hopper assembly further including a flag providing a force to move the documents along the hopper floor toward the feeder and to feed a document with a presentation force, wherein the force provided by the flag urges the document stack in a direction from the hopper floor far end toward the hopper floor near end; a vibration source means for vibrating the hopper floor such that hopper floor vibration is stronger at the far end with the hopper floor vibration diminishing along the direction from the hopper floor far end toward the hopper floor near end such that the vibration is weaker at the near end to cause a dynamic weight of the document stack to be reduced through vibration, particularly at the hopper floor far end when the document stack is large, so as to reduce variation in the presentation force at the feeder; a transport stage downstream of the feeder stage for receiving the fed documents; wherein the hopper floor is composed of a set of rails that are sufficiently stiff so as to vibrate in only one bending mode.