抄録
A large amount of mechatoronic equipments for the material handling of vegetables and fruits have been introduced into the agriculture and the food manufactures in Hokkaido. However, the individual differences among the size, shape, and the mass of these products of are very large, and the verification of the mechanisms and the control systems is still verified in the try-and-error way using physical prototypes. This makes the development of the equipments time-consuming and expensive. In this research, a virtual prototyping tool was developed intended for the design of "automatic potato grader". First, 3D grader mechanism model with 3D "potato geometry model" was built, and the operation of the grader part was simulated in cooperation with the control program mounted on the real PLC.
