Food industryBrief
In Greece, 8 robots remove defective peaches: the hardest part was not the AI but the gripper
Switzerland's Stäubli has supplied Agrophoenix's Greek plant with a vision and artificial intelligence inspection system designed by Dutch start-up QING, Korean site Robot Newspaper (로봇신문) reports.
At the plant, 8 Stäubli SCARA robots pick up peach halves. They do not pick the good ones, but those with a defect.
According to Will Uiting, QING's sales director, a robot can pick up one peach half per second. The fruit has already been sorted upstream and the defect rate is low. The 8 STAQ cells therefore let 15 tonnes of peaches through every hour.
Lazaros Ioannidis, partner and project manager at Agrophoenix, says the plant counts by weight, not by piece. A peach weighs about 150 g. According to him, around 3,600 pieces may be rejected in the course of an hour.
The cells use the HE (humid environment) version of Stäubli's TS2-80, which withstands washing with water, Will Uiting explains.
It took two seasons, rather than one, to bring the 8 cells into production. According to the article, the difficulty lay not with the AI, the software or the robots, but with the gripper and the material in contact with the peeled peaches, which are slippery.
Source
- 로봇신문 Robot Newspaper · irobotnews.com
