SIPhTR: Small Item Photographing Triage Robot

In many industries such as manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, there are many small items involved! Pills, screws, machined parts, very small rocks, you name it! These objects can be tedious to handle and time consuming to sort. Ain't nobody got time for that! If only there was a way to just..."sipht" through it all!
SIPhTR has many design challenges and will make use of many interesting pieces of technology.

Mechanical design to load items from the hopper to the staging area one at a time
Image acquisition hardware to clearly capture the item to be sorted
Computer electronics with image processing and sorting algorithms
Robotics to physically sort processed material
...And probably more!

A Three Tiered Challenge
Challenge 1 - SIPhT by COLOR!
Given an assortment of small items of uniform shape and size, SIPhTR shall sort by color
SIPhTR shall be able to physically sort at least 12 different colors, but the electronics shall be programmable to algorithmically sort more
Assumed size of bead to be used shall be a standard "perler" or fuse bead with dimensions as shown below
Challenge 2 - SIPhT by SHAPE!
Given an assortment of small items, SIPhTR shall sort by size and shape
SIPhTR shall be able to physically sort at least 12 unique sizes and shapes, but the electronics shall be programmable to algorithmically sort more
The resolution of objects to be sorted shall be 500 microns. SIPhTR shall support items as small as 3 mm3 and as large as 15 mm3.
Challenge 3 - SIPhT with OCR
Given an assortment of lettered beads, SIPhTR shall sort with optical character recognition (OCR)
Letters can be assumed to be from the roman alphabet
Lettered beads can be assumed to be uniform shape and size
Other Performance Specifications
Speed
In order to be as efficient as possible, SIPhTR should sort quickly! At a rate of at least 0.2 Hz (or 1 bead every 5 seconds) but the team should stretch for a rate of 1 Hz.