2007 Volume 69 Issue 1 Pages 68-77
Because the capability of inspecting all sides of each fruit has become a highly desirable feature of a grading system, a new type of rotary tray was developed, as a part of a grading line, to flip a fruit over during quality inspection by color and monochrome machine vision systems. Each grading line consisted of 348 rotary trays and ran at a speed of 38.1m/min. Since this grading machine had 6 lines, it was capable of sorting a total of 504, 000 fruits per day. However, the processing rate of this grading system has reached only 85% of the expected level, because of the operator's fruit unpacking rate. The automated packing and unpacking systems were considered to provide the grading system a fruit tracing capability in addition to labor saving.
