Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

Re:Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’ by fnordfnordfnord on Wednesday October 21, 2015 @03:41PM (#10428069)

I used to develop food sorters. Color sorting is very simple in principle and much harder in practice. The main difficulties are good lighting, not shaking your cameras and optics to pieces and keeping the optics and lights clean.

For fruit sorting in particular there is the very difficult task of conveying the fruit without damaging it. The best sorter in the world won't help you if it mangles the fruit.

In my old lab, there are solutions to most of the common food sorting problems, not all of those solutions make it out to the field though.

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Re:Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’ by scientist on Wednesday October 21, 2015 @04:26PM (#10428427)

How big is this market?

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Re:Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’ by fnordfnordfnord on Wednesday October 21, 2015 @05:48PM (#10428967)

TBH, I suck at the business sides of things so I'm not the best guy to ask, but my impression is that the market isn't s great as one might think considering how much for we all eat. There ought to be a lot of room for growth if the machines actually move out to the field. Most of them are sitting inside cleaning plants because they are delicate and expensive. Search for Buhler, Sortex, Allen, Satake, Selgron for some example companies in that space.

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