Horticulture Industry

Reducing the labour costs for processing fresh produce.

Take a look at a traditional packhouse with all the people working in it, using knives to trim and cut produce as it arrives from harvest. Often an immigrant labour force, critical to the operation, as produce has to be inspected and trimmed before it is sent to be packaged.

The demands of the consumer and the supermarket means that produce has to be presented in a certain way – trimmed here, portioned there, with the bad bits removed. This is the domain of a human being with a blade. They work in an inhospitable environment doing a critical job. Recruiting those people and keeping them is a real challenge.

We can emulate the work a human does using a robot and a stereo vision system. The stereo vision system looks at the produce and determines how something might be cut.

The vision system sends the data to a robot which makes the cut. An optimum cut that minimises ‘giveaway’ but also reduces waste.

It’s the holy grail of food production and we have delivered a number of these systems which are improving quality and reducing the need to employ labour for many hours. Ultimately, it’s a win-win with sustainability a key benefit of robotic post harvest processing.

• We use a 3D camera – this emulates what a human being can see.
• We then send that 3D image to a neural processor – this is the ‘brain’ of the system.
• The system analyses what it sees, recognises features on the produce (the end of a stem, or root fly damage for example) and then sends the robot the coordinates to remove the offending item.
• The robot and the 3D vision system are synchronised to work together, so the robot can pick and present the produce to a blade – usually a water blade.