Hypermodular parallel printing systems

Abstract

Modularity in system design offers many potential advantages. Xerox has a long history of increasingly deep modularization of printing systems. The present work describes a system of parallel marking engines (MEs) enabled by a paper path that has a level of modularity near the finest granularity of the design spectrum ('hyper-modularity'.) The paper path consists of a small number of module types - nip modules to provide bidirectional sheet motion and two types of directors for dynamic definition of path topology. Each module is capable of acting, sensing, computing and communicating. Modules, including MEs, are hot swappable, and the system is capable of auto-configuring. Realtime planning and control software, like the hardware, is designed to be modular, distributed, reconfigurable and scalable. The system can handle exceptions, such as sheet jams, while maintaining (reduced) throughput.