SMART SENSING PACKAGE

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Automatic smart grading system for the food industry

Project: AGILEHAND

Publisher: UNINOVA, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Technology: Big Data, Data Analytics

Industry: Food Packaging Market Medium, Manufacturing

INTRODUCTION

Revolutionize food processing with the fully automatic Smart Sensing Suite for superior quality and efficiency.

The AgileHand Smart Sensing Suite is a fully automatic smart grading system designed specifically for the food processing industry. This innovative solution leverages advanced technology to objectively classify food products, ensuring outstanding quality and increased throughput compared to traditional human-centered methods.

The Smart Sensing Suite improves food processing by automating the grading process, significantly reducing human error, and ensuring consistent, high-quality output. The system's objective classification capabilities lead to more precise and reliable grading, helping companies meet stringent quality standards and enhance their overall productivity.

FEATURES/BENEFITS

The expected improvements of using this technologies' package are:

  • Reduce human error: Minimizes inconsistencies and errors associated with manual grading.
  • Enhanced compliance: Meet stringent industry standards and regulatory requirements with ease.
  • Increased throughput: Automated processes significantly boost productivity and operational efficiency.
  • Higher quality assurance: Objective classification ensures consistent and superior product quality.
  • Cost efficiency: Reduces labor costs and improves overall operational cots-efectiveness.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

The expected improvements of using this technologies' package are:

  • Increase by 25% the pace of the product scanning system.
  • Reduce by 20% the number of delicate products damaged during handling, sorting and packaging
  • Increase the degree of product traceability in a processing line by 30%
  • Reduce time to add new products to a processing line by 20%. 
  • 20% reduction of waiting times in production queues. 
  • Reduction of energy consumption by 15%. 

RESOURCES

The technology solutions that will be implemented in this package are:

  • Agilehand grade the quality: A cost-effective, accurate, and fast solution to grade the quality (both interior and exterior) of delicate objects.
  • Agilehand self-calibrating: A self-calibrating solution for producing networks of sensors to improve production-line traceability.
  • Agilehand data-sets: Data-sets containing scans of delicate objects in a real environment with ground-truth data.

USE CASE

These solutions are already being implemented in the following use cases:

Frozen fish

The Smart Sensing package is being tested at PRODUMAR, a frozen fish company in Porto, Portugal. This initiative aims to assist operators in classifying fish steaks by collecting annotated samples to train an algorithm, developed in collaboration with technology providers UNINOVA and FBK. 

The team has verified classification requirements, tested a depth camera on the production line, and gathered datasets, key steps in developing self-calibrating sensing solutions to improve traceability and efficiency across the production line.

Chicken fillets

The Smart Sensing packageg is being tested and implemented at MARELEC, a high-tech manufacturing company in Nieuwpoort, Belgium. The goal is to grade chicken fillets into two categories based on criteria such as the presence of blood clots, rips, or other defects. The plan involves acquiring a dataset to train a deep learning model that will facilitate this grading process.

The expected outcomes include reducing product grading time by up to 30%, enhancing grading accuracy, and decreasing waste by up to 20%.

Fruit

The Smart Sensing package is being tested and implemented at Sant’Orsola, a small fruit producer in Italy, to address the challenge of grading raspberries at the individual fruit level.

Using the suite's technologies, they are conducting a feasibility analysis and anticipate achieving up to a 15% improvement in grading accuracy, which could lead to a reduction in waste by up to 10%.

Vegetables

Multiscan currently specializes in item-level grading of fruits and vegetables. The objective within the AgileHand project, using the Smart Sensing package, is to pregrade a crate of fruits and vegetables before unloading them into the grading machine. This pregrading will help tailor the machine's parameters to the specific batch, based on criteria such as size, shape, and defects.

The expected outcomes include a 15% improvement in the grading process and a reduction in overall grading time by up to 20%.

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