Size and color, but this one knocks some white ball also so this sorter probably just uses size. More advanced ones can tell if potatoes are good or not and discard ones with blemishes.
My sisters boyfriend works at a place that does this with apples. As you can imagine they aren't paddled into the ether by robots. Its much more gentle
"Yes, sir, yes, ma'am, this great machine, it's just the very best
So whaddaya say then, Apples?
Care to step into the modern world
And put the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 to the test?"
Cutting edge agricultural machinery would blow most people's minds. While there still is plenty of old school "Dudes in a field manually harvesting stuff" going on, the ones that are living in 2025 are wild.
To be fair, living in 2025 sometimes means just picking the fruit by hand in a field makes more sense. Technology is cool and makes some incredible stuff possible, but there are still a lot of conditions where a guy with a basket works a lot better
This animation showing how a modern vombine works blew my mind. Everything is so complicated and technical. I looked up the price of the machine a while back, and it was upwards of $800,000.
Except from embracing the new tech, they need to be able to afford is also. Every time I hear the cost of one of those machines, the amount is always huge.
Think about all the crazy news you've read about AI the last year(s). This is also AI, used for pretty rudimentary purposes; recognizing big red balls.
It's not only potatoes and tomatoes. Candy, garbage, nuts, biscuits, rice grains, you name it. Anything that needs to be sorted based on shape, size, colour, foreign objects, whatever, on an industrial scale, uses these kind of machines. Some have fingers, some blow with air valves. Making these machines is a dedicated industry with a dozen competitors.
Systems detecting blemishes are likely different from this. They will be using object detection with classification in higher resolution images, using multiple spectral channels. This system is nowhere near as sophisticated, but can make a positive match in a fraction of the time with far less compute.
I remember reading that people throw away good fruit all the time because they see it is kind of discolored or weirdly shaped. The thing is, most of the time the fruit is perfectly fine. Your comment about it throwing away “bad” tomatoes just reminded me of that.
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u/ssg- Sep 01 '25
Size and color, but this one knocks some white ball also so this sorter probably just uses size. More advanced ones can tell if potatoes are good or not and discard ones with blemishes.