Apple Packing
The great promise of robotics in farming is that they can generally do simple, repetitive tasks faster, better, and for longer than humans, leaving the people more time to take on the complex tasks of growing food.
One great example comes from Robotics Plus Ltd., which has developed The Apple Packer, a robotic system that packs at twice the speed of a human being, and can operate 24 hours a day, every day, if necessary.
“Packing apples is a labour intensive task for packing houses around the world,” the company points out, adding, “The labour to fulfill this role is often difficult to find, which can jeopardize the produce if it is not packed in time.”
The RPL Apple Packer achieves an inhumanly fast packing speed of 120 apples per minute, while at the same time meeting the stringent demands of Canadian packing houses by ensuring optimal fruit handling.
And, just like a human operator, the RPL Apple Packer can differentiate between apple types, and carefully aligns the apples in the correct orientation, with all of the stems lying horizontal in the trays and pointing in the right direction, all at two apples per second.
The system includes a multi-head “pick-and-place robot,” apple singulating lanes with a vision system that gets the apples into the correct orientation, automatic tray pocket recognition, and full control systems and analysis algorithms that make it all happen.