Incremental printing of symbolic information – Ink jet – Combined
Reexamination Certificate
1997-04-23
2001-01-16
Barlow, John (Department: 2853)
Incremental printing of symbolic information
Ink jet
Combined
C430S363000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06174036
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to electronic systems for labeling bundled lumber.
DESCRIPTION OF PRIOR ART
Lumber is most often transferred from primary manufacturer, to secondary manufacturer, to wholesaler and finally to retailer in bundled units. These units typically consist of lumber which is at least the same species, grade and thickness. When leaving the primary manufacturer, i.e. a sawmill, the units are of both random width and length. The secondary manufacturer, e.g. a kiln and/or surfacing yard, will usually regrade and repack the original units prior to shipping them to the wholesaler. As an added service, they may also sort the lumber into fixed width, two length packs. The wholesaler may then repackage these units into fixed width and fixed or two length packs, if this has not already been done. Hence, each step in this process will usually involve at least the repackaging of the bundled units.
The wholesaler may then sell these bundled units to other wholesalers or retailers. With the growing popularity of large retail home centers, many wholesalers find themselves providing additional services just for the home center in an effort to help these large retailers cut their processing costs. One such service is to individually label each board in each unit in such a way that the boards may be handled using bar code readers at checkout counters. The current state of the art in this area are computer systems which generate small bar coded labels that can be fed into hand help labeling devices. These devices are used by yard men to individually label each board. This process has several drawbacks including the cost of paying for human labor to actually apply each label, the potential to mislabel individual boards and the time required to conduct the entire process.
One of the reasons that this is a difficult function to automate is that each bundled unit may be constructed differently from any other unit. This construction refers to the number of boards on each course (or layer) of the unit as well as the number of total courses. Furthermore, while each board is typically of the same thickness, they may have varying widths and or lengths within an individual unit, let alone across several units. Heretofore, the ability of recognizing the various sizes of individual boards within each unit as well as the ability to effectively apply the proper label to each board by controllably moving a label application device, has been best met by the human visual and hand-eye coordination systems.
The present inventors have been granted U.S. Pat. No. 5,307,294 for their invention of the Automated End Tally System which is capable of automatically determining the three dimensional end topology of any unit of lumber. This system is further capable of determining each unit's “end tally” based upon each unit's end topology. Given the teachings of this prior art and the current state of the art in robotics and label generating systems, it is now possible to create an entirely automated system capable of recognizing the exact location of individual boards within a bundled unit of lumber, of generating unique labels for each recognized board and of subsequently applying each label to each appropriate board. Such a system will overcome the current problems of costly human labor and potentially mislabelled boards while greatly reducing the time required to label an entire unit.
An additional problem is faced by wholesalers who re-manufacture their lumber prior to resale. Specifically, in the case where the wholesaler receives distinct units of like lumber from multiple mills and then regrades, resorts and/or re-manufactures (e.g. cuts) these units in such a way that lumber from more than one mill gets co-mingled when repacking new processed units, a problem then occurs in that the wholesaler can no longer track quality and yield by mill. This is because like lumber from one mill is indistinguishable from that of another mill and can only be tracked if it remains in separate distinct units.
A similar but different problem faces wholesalers that regrade rejected plywood. In this case each rejected plywood unit is purchased at a fixed price per sheet. Every piece of each unit will be examined and then reclassified into at least two different grades of rejects. New units are constructed from the pieces of the original units. It is desirable to know the actual cost of each new regraded unit which would be based upon the actual cost of each of the pieces making up the unit. Since these pieces have no distinguishing markings it is not possible to differentiate them for costing purposes. Proposals have been made to individually tag each piece when the original units are received so that this tag may then serve to uniquely identify the plywood in the new regraded units. This proposal has similar drawbacks to the current board end labeling techniques including the cost of paying for human labor to actually apply each label as well as the time required to conduct the entire process. In addition to these problems, plywood sheets may be as thin as one quarter of an inch which is very little room on which to apply a label and their end surfaces may not be smooth enough to hold the label depending upon the adhering technique employed.
Note that the Automated End Tally System as patented is fully capable of creating end topologies and tally counts for units of plywood by using the same techniques as applied to units of lumber. Furthermore, the end topologies of either lumber or plywood are unique to each unit and therefore must be retrievable based upon some unit identification means. The present inventors currently have pending under application Ser. No. 08/263/090 an Automated Lumber Unit Tracking System which operates to uniquely track the whereabouts in the lumber yard of each and every unit. Hence, as units are moved by transporting vehicles such as a fork lift, they are immediately identified to an office computer system which may then recall each unit's end topology and tally count information which was previously determined by the end tally system. This topology information is extremely important to any automated system for labeling boards in that it essentially provides the same information determined by the human visual system to direct the hand-eye coordination.
As can be seen by those familiar with lumber processing, each of the above stated three problems are of a similar nature and stem from one fundamental problem. Namely, individual pieces of lumber (or plywood) are indistinguishable from other pieces of at least a similar specie, grade, thickness, width and length. And while they arrive at the wholesalers yard conveniently segregated into bundled units which can easily be associated with both the producing mill and the purchase cost, while at the yard, these units are broken and repackaged with lumber from other mills, thereby loosing all identity. Given the current state of the art in polymer and laser technologies, it is possible to individually mark each board within each unit when it arrives at the wholesaler. Such demarcation then allows the wholesaler to process these boards and then to ultimately construct new units out of boards from one or more mills while still being able to accurately track the original vendor and cost by each piece. This then provides an accurate means of tracking yield by vendor and the actual cost of each new mixed unit. This same technique can also be applied to uniquely identifying (e.g. bar coding) hoards in units about to be shipped to large retailers as opposed to using robotic devices to apply individual labels mimicking the current human based methods. Such a system will overcome the current problems of costly human labor and the time required to label an entire unit while also providing the advantages of working with thinner material which might have poor end surfaces on which to attach labels, such as plywood. And finally, labels are currently attached by means of a staple since forms of gluing would not be as we
Aman James A.
Haller William R.
Barlow John
Hallacher Craig A.
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