Showcasing a start-of-the-art sorting solution and two other innovative new products, TOMRA Food had a strong presence at this year’s PMA Fresh Summit.
TOMRA exhibited the TOMRA 5A, its innovative new model for potato sorting, Compac revealed its new UltraView inspection module that maximises Spectrim’s grading performance and BBC Technologies introduced LUCAi™ software, bringing sophisticated artificial intelligence to fresh blueberry sorting.
The Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit, held at the Anaheim Convention Centre in Orange County, California, is the largest in the Western Hemisphere for the fresh produce and floral industries. Approximately 19,000 people from more than 60 nations visited the three-day event, which was held October 17 to 19.
TOMRA Food displayed its state-of-the-art TOMRA 5A sorting machine for potato processing. This achieves an unrivalled 98% removal rate of foreign objects, ejecting from the infeed belt unwanted materials such as stones, corn cobs and roots, wood, glass, plastics, golf balls and metals.
Compac unveiled UltraView, a new inspection module that integrates with the Spectrim cabinet to maximise grading performance. The only solution of its kind for boosting detection of stem bowl and tip defects in fruit, this will increase line efficiency for various types of fresh produce such as apples, lemons, stone fruit, kiwifruit and avocados.
BBC Technologies launched LUCAi™, new artificial intelligence software for grading blueberries which can be easily retrofitted to their KAT0260 for better classifications and more refined sorting. This improves sensitivity to subtle fruit defects, such as dehydration, bruising and early anthracnose.
Compac launches UltraView, enhancing the market-leading Spectrim grading platform
UltraView is a new inspection module that integrates with the Compac Spectrim cabinet to provide ultimate detection of defects located in the critical stem bowl and tip areas of the fruit, defects that can be difficult to detect due to their shape and location.
The UltraView module contains a dedicated set of high-resolution multi-spectral (colour and infrared) cameras and LED lights, which are located ideally close to the fruit, parallel to its direction of travel.
In this unique position, the UltraView cameras generate superior quality images for accurate inspection of the fruit’s stem bowl and tip regions. The module’s location on the sizer, directly after the Spectrim cabinet, means that the fruit on the carrier is ideally oriented for presentation to the UltraView sensors.
UltraView was field validated in trials run through full pack seasons at sites in the USA and New Zealand. The technology reduces the need for manual checking of difficult defects, which causes line slow-downs. This results in improved line efficiency and lower packhouse labour requirements, as well as increasing opportunities to adopt tray-filling automation.
Compac’s Spectrim optical sorting platform and Inspectra² near-infrared sorting platform recently won the PwC Commercial Impact Award at the 2019 KiwiNet Awards for the development of world-leading fruit grading and sorting technologies, public recognition of Compac’s commitment to groundbreaking research and development, which has also led to UltraView.
BBC Technologies’ releases LUCAi™, the first artificial intelligence offering to the blueberry industry
By employing the latest powerful software and hardware, LUCAi™ artificial intelligence takes blueberry grading to an unprecedented level.
LUCAi™ uses artificial intelligence techniques to classify and grade fruit to precise market demands. The classification is derived from a learning set generated by more than a quarter-million individually classified images over the last five years.
As part of BBC Technologies’ ongoing Berry Science Program, LUCAi™ will continue to increase its knowledge base as more and more variety-specific and seasonal-specific images become available.
As fruit passes along a grading line, each piece of fruit is photographed by multiple cameras. LUCAi™ then identifies and instructs how each individual berry is to be classified. LUCAi™ can process up to 2,400 individual images of fruit each second.
This impressive speed and accuracy are achieved by employing 17,408 graphics processors capable of 304,000,000,000,000 RTX operations per second. LUCAi™ is also able to view fruit in wavelengths not visible to the human eye, further enhancing sorting accuracy.
BBC Technologies has initially made LUCAi™ available as an add-on for its KATO260 optical blueberry grader. LUCAi™ has been validated in packhouses, processing a wide range of blueberries and thousands of tons of fruit at customer locations in Canada, Chile, New Zealand and the US.
In these real-world trials, LUCAi™ proved easy to use and sensitive to subtle defects in the fruit, such as dehydration, bruising, and early anthracnose. These advantages help packhouses reduce waste, sell at higher values and confidently sort fruit that may require a longer shelf life to allow greater travel time to the point-of-sale.
About TOMRA Food
TOMRA Food designs and manufactures sensor-based sorting machines and integrated post-harvest solutions for the food industry, using the world’s most advanced grading, sorting, peeling and analytical technology.
Over 8,000 units are installed at food growers, packers and processors around the world for fruits, nuts, vegetables, potato products, grains and seeds, dried fruit, meat and seafood.
The company’s mission is to enable its customers to improve returns, gain operational efficiencies, and ensure a safe food supply via smart, useable technologies.
To find out more, please use the enquiry form to get in touch.
