Conveyor Belt System Design

The top photograph shows that you are already using aluminum profiles with T slots. Some of the companies supplying this type of product have a very wide range, including conveyor components that attach to the T slots. ITEM™ is one example but there are many others so try your current supplier first. The conveyor belt you need must contain pockets the hold a single example of whatever it is you are sorting and you need side guides that only permit a single lane of samples to be scanned for the required quality. This allows the belt to be much narrower (cheaper) and investigate modular belts as you can configure the belt to your specific requirements. Base the construction of your belt on the sample being sorted, e.g. food grade, easy to clean down for dirty product, wire to allow crumbs to fall through, metal if the items are hot or very heavy. If you want the system to be fully automatic you will need a gating system to load one item into each pocket from some sort of hopper. Because there is some distance between the scanning camera and the sorting head you need to store the scan results in a FIFO register that will increment each time a pocket passes under the camera. Don't increment based on the items themselves or the system will not work when there are some empty pockets. You will need to adjust the position of the camera to make it an exact number of increments in front of the actuator in-feed position.

As an alternative, incline the bed of the machine, put inlet and outlet gates to feed single items under the camera, set the diverter before opening the outlet gate and allow gravity to do the work.