Automatic Sorting of Agricultural Products

Abstract

In the present sorting of agricultural products, size sorting is carried out mechanically by the sizer, but the sorting of color and injury is carried out manually. In this study is that the sorting by the size, color and injury is carried out automatically and simultaneously.
An optoelectronic method was used to detect the diameter, height and color (Fig. 1).
The size (diameter a and height h) detecting apparatus consists of the phototransistors arranged at each 5mm vertically and the logic circuit used of transistor transistor logic integral circuit (Fig. 2). The color detecting apparatus consists of two kinds of photodiodes and or filters, they have the different specral response to wave length of light (Fig. 4). Difference or ratio of voltages from two photodiodes were named the color variables c or d.
The discriminant function was calculated by the ratio of ciameter and height (f), and color variable (c or d). As a result of Satsuma mandarins and tomatoes by the computer, the accuracy of new sorting seemed identical with the original manual sorting.
In future, it is necessary to increased the accuracy of detecting of size and color, by computerized sorting process.