In my previous post, “The agri-bots are coming!” I steered you to a story in The Economist about automation in agriculture. Well it’s been pointed out to me that inspection and sorting or grading of fruit and vegetables is already a big machine vision market (actually I have to thank Andy Wilson and a post he made on his machine vision blog for the information.)
Andy was referring to a case study on the Lumenera web site which describes how their USB cameras are being used by a New Zealand-based company, Oraka Technologies, to grade asparagus spears.
The Lumenera write up is interesting, but it’s nowhere near as much fun as watching the video of the asparagus grading machine in action. For that you need to use this link to the Oraka asparagus grading machine.
On a more serious note, this is yet another example of a niche application for machine vision. I’m pretty sure that inspecting asparagus has little in common with sorting potatoes, grading carrots, or counting peas, so with all of these, a unique application has to be developed. Kudos to Oraka for finding an exploiting an application with replication potential!
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