Precise newspaper sorting system wins Extreme Machine contest

Tilt-Tray Sortation System and the engineering team that developed it at Automated Control Technologies (ACT) recently won the 2004 Extreme Machine of the Year Award after receiving the most votes from subscribers of Control Engineering (CE) and Design News magazines. Rockwell Automation sponsored and organized this first annual Extreme Machine Award program in conjunction wit...

By Staff March 1, 2005

Tilt-Tray Sortation System and the engineering team that developed it at Automated Control Technologies (ACT) recently won the 2004 Extreme Machine of the Year Award after receiving the most votes from subscribers of Control Engineering (CE) and Design News magazines. Rockwell Automation sponsored and organized this first annual Extreme Machine Award program in conjunction with the two publications. Nominees for the award were required to have used Rockwell’s technologies in their applications.

Tilt-Tray is used at the New York Daily News’ printing facility to help sort and bundle 1.3 million newspapers daily via 18 conveyors with redundant controls. The new system prevents downtime, and has already improved delivery times by 15% and reduced waste by 13,000 papers per day.

The five candidates for Extreme Machine of the Year were nominated by Rockwell’s engineers, Frank Bartos, CE ‘s executive editor; and Karen Field, Design News ‘ editor-in-chief.

Rockwell’s equipment used in the Tilt-Tray system include its ControlLogix system redundancy module 1757-SRM; Bulletin 160 variable frequency drives; 1336 Plus drives, DeviceNet and ControlNet communications network; and 35 PanelView operator interface terminals.