September/October 2024 - 15

PROCESSING
" I've been working on this since the beginning. This was,
good or bad, kind of my idea to do this with almonds, " he
said. " I've been watching them (the machines) for 10 years,
and when it's working right, it still blows me away, and it is
fun to watch. It's very fast. Each robot can do - we say 150,
200, but I've watched them do well over 200 picks a minute. "
The first robotic sorting technology Pflueger encountered
was designed to handle ears of corn. He immediately
wondered if the tech could be applied to almonds, but
worried that the nuts' smaller size could be problematic.
" It actually made it easier, " he said. " Say you've got a
10-inch long piece of corn. If the defect's on the very end,
that's where the robot wanted to go. Trying to pick an ear of
corn up from the end is very difficult. With AI and then the
almonds, we see the almond, we see the defect, and then go
to the middle of the almond. So that was a big help. "
Another key resource-enhancing component of the
PRAIRIE SCP-2100, Pflueger said, is its ability to separate
defects into three categories.
" Most sorting pieces of equipment just sort everything
into one bin. We take the individual rejects and separate
them, " he said.
That process separates rejects into trash, nuts to be sold
for milk or candy, and products to be sold for animal food.
" It saves (customers) a nickel a pound later, " Pflueger
said. " If you pick out a few hundred pounds of nuts a day,
at the end of the season, you've got a half million pounds
or a million pounds to re-run. At a nickel a pound, well ... "
The three-way separation also saves time, Pflueger
said, and labor costs, as humans are no longer required to
perform repetitive tasks.
A new kind of worker
With companies competing for workers - especially in
California, where the minimum wage increased to $16 an
hour in January - the jobs rendered unnecessary by AI are
ones that are difficult to fill anyway, Pflueger said.
" What it does, though, is create a higher-paying job, "
Pflueger said. " Somebody's got to learn how to use this.
Somebody's got to be able to operate it. Somebody's got
to learn some of the maintenance. There won't be as many
jobs, and that's where we save the labor.
" Now we're going to have somebody that's a little bit
higher up the pay scale that's going to be in charge of the
system and keeping it running. "
Pflueger pointed out, however, that that system -
contrary to some impressions - doesn't actually learn the
same way humans do.
" It figures things out on its own, and by that, what I mean
is that we teach it something, " he said. " It's going to try and
fit whatever you push through it into one of the boxes you've
given it to choose from. It will take all the data points and get
it to the box closest to what it thinks it is. If it's wrong, it'll
look for a different box. That's the learning part of it.
" People are afraid of this stuff - 'It's going to take over the
world!' No. It's only going to do what people tell it to do. "
Start-of-line advances
Pennsylvania-based separation technology company
Eriez is also a pioneer in AI-assisted sorting.
In 2019, Eriez debuted the NanoRanch AI Sorter, which
uses vision to identify and sort a customizable range of
nonferrous materials. The sorter provides greater than
95% accuracy when the machine is trained with samples,
according to the company, and has a capacity of 1,000
pounds per hour.
Eriez, founded in 1942, offers cutting-edge metal
detection in industries from mining to pharmaceuticals.
Within the food industry, including produce and nuts, its
equipment solutions include three main product groups:
magnetic separation, metal detection and vibratory feeding
and screening.
" All three of those products can be found in both the
produce and nut industry from start to finish - coming
out of the fields all the way to the finished packaged
NATIONALNUTGROWER.COM 15
http://www.NATIONALNUTGROWER.COM
September/October 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of September/October 2024
