1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a conveying apparatus for an article to be inspected by an inspecting apparatus for small articles such as medicine in the form of tablets, capsules, etc., small confectionery such as a candy and the like, a washer, a battery cell, or the like, in a defect inspection process, a visual inspection process, a dimensional check process or the like.
2. Background Art
When inspecting surfaces of articles such as the small articles conveyed using a conveying apparatus, a plurality of conveying apparatuses formed in a linear direction have been conventionally arranged in series so as to easily transfer the article from one conveying apparatus to another conveying apparatus. However, this requires a lot of space to accommodate the linear conveying apparatuses. Alternatively, when positioning the conveying apparatus in a vertical direction, the linear space required to accommodate the apparatus is reduced but the height required to accommodate the conveying apparatus increases. As such, a conveyed article held by suctioning sometimes vibrates more a higher elevations and this makes it difficult to properly inspect these articles.
Further, the linear conveying apparatus is designed with a pair of parallel belts on which the article is placed and suction device for holding the article in place. If the diameter of the belts increase and a small article is conveyed, the side surfaces of these articles cannot be properly inspected because the side surfaces are covered by the belts.
Further, another type of conveying apparatus is the conventional type rotary disc apparatus. The rotary disc apparatus includes a contact portion made of an aluminum metal or the like, which comes into contact with the article. The contact portion has a low coefficient of friction which causes the article to slip, whereby the conveying of the article is easily displaced by its own weight.
Further, this kind of structure (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 61-212374) is provided with movable opposing plates. A slit is provided between the plates with the gap small enough to prevent the article from falling between the plates. A suctioning device having a rotary tube shaft concentrically pierced in an inner side of the movable opposing plates, communicates with an inner portion of the rotary tube shaft and sucks air from the slit to an inner side of the movable opposing plates. However, since the rotary tube shaft is provided, the air is unnecessarily sucked from the slit corresponding to a portion requiring no suction.
Further, the conveyed article proceeds to the conveying apparatus, the aligning and supplying apparatus is used. The conventional aligning and supplying apparatus is structured such that the conveyed article supplied on a turn table is exposed to an aligning operation of an aligning guide together with a rotation of the turn table, and is gradually aligned along a peripheral wall. The conveyed article reaching a thickness gate from the aligning guide is sorted on the border of a predetermined thickness, and the conveyed article having a thickness equal to or less than the thickness passes through the thickness gate so as to reach a width guide. The conveyed article reaching the width guide is sorted on the border of a predetermined width, and the conveyed article having a width equal to or less than the width passes through the width guide so as to be fed out to the conveying apparatus.
However, the article having the different width and thickness and being stable in a state of turning at 90 degrees, such as the tablet or the like is sorted at the thickness gate. The more a rate of the 90 degrees turn becomes, the more a number or an amount thereof sorted by the thickness gate becomes, whereby the number of the conveyed article fed out to the conveying apparatus is reduced. Accordingly, a processing efficiency is significantly deteriorated.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a conveying apparatus which can execute a side surface inspection of a small article without requiring a lot of space, execute an inspection in a rotary disc apparatus and shut out an air in a portion requiring no suction.
Further, present invention provides an aligning and supplying apparatus which can improve the processing efficiency even with small articles having different widths and thicknesses.