Method and apparatus for collating rod-shaped articles

摘要

Rod-shaped articles such as cigarettes are stored in a hopper (12) and transferred into a single cigarette column. The bottom cigarette in the column is pushed by an inserter rod (28) into an aperture (32) in a mandrel (30). The mandrel has a plurality of spaced apertures which can be filled with the desired collation. The mandrel is controlled by a Cartesian robot which moves the position of mandrel with respect to the inserter rod so that all the required apertures can be filled. The entire collation is then removed to a collation pocket (40) by a set of transfer rods spaced to match the apertures in the collation mandrel. In the pocket neighbouring cigarettes are brought into contact and the collation can then be packaged.