Purpose – This paper aims to study a commercially available industrial part feeder that uses an industrial robot arm and computer vision system. Three conveyor belts are arranged to singulate and circulate parts, bringing them under a camera where their pose is recognized and subsequently manipulated by the robot arm. The problem is addressed of optimizing belt speeds and hence throughput of this feeder that avoid: starvation, where no parts are visible to the camera and saturation, where too many parts prevent part pose detection or grasping.Design/methodology/approach – Models are developed for intermittent and continuous motion feeding based on a 2D Poisson process. Renewal theory is applied to model intermittent motion and an M/G/1 queue with customer impatience to model continuous motion feeding. These models are verified using discrete event simulation.Findings – The models predict and optimize feeder behaviour very accurately and it is possible to compute optimal settings for different part sizes a...