[HeyLaughingBoy]

> solid material handling in general, is a perennial problem

Ugh! Yes. One one machine I worked on, this was one of our major issues. We had a subsystem whose job it was to get small plastic containers out of a bulk hopper, orient them correctly, and deposit them into a carriage all with a failure rate, IIRC, on the order of "no more than one unrecoverable jam every 10,000 units."

An "unrecoverable jam" was one that required human intervention to open the container and clear the jam by hand. Fun fact: tiny nonconductive plastic containers are very susceptible to static cling!

This was my introduction to bulk material handling (I was the dev writing the code) and its associated patent minefield. Just about every good idea the very experienced mechanical engineer could think of was already patented. In the end we got it to work and met the spec, but not without a lot of hard work.

At my previous job we had similar issues with paper. The company had an entire Paper Handling lab staffed with people constantly working on better ways of moving a sheet of paper from one place to another at speed. Paper might actually be worse because changing the humidity changes its properties quite a bit.