Automation

Increasing customer demands coupled with the need for automation and labor reduction make end-of-line packaging a key area for food producers. Produceprocessing recently checked in with representatives from three companies with expertise in this area. They include Wayne DeCou, Volm’s sales director of…

Waymo and Fiat Chrysler Automotive are extending their four-year-old partnership to include commercial vans. On Wednesday, the companies announced a plan to jointly develop an autonomous delivery van based on FCA’s Ram ProMaster.

Waymo, the self-driving division of Google parent Alphabet, announced back in 2016 that FCA would be its first OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partner. Since then, the two companies have worked together to retrofit a fleet of hundreds of Chrysler Pacifica minivans with Waymo’s self-driving hardware and software. Now, the companies will work together on a new project — an autonomous delivery van — in the service of Waymo’s nascent delivery service, Waymo Via.

Moreover, FCA has chosen Waymo as its...

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A fruit picking robot scheme led by Saga Robotics in Lincoln will receive nearly £2.5 million as part of a new UK government funding initiative to drive efficiency in food production. The ‘Robot Highways’ project aims to act as a catalyst for a sustainable farming industry in the future by maintaining or…

Amazon unveiled its six-wheel delivery robot, Scout, in January 2019, but has only been slowly expanding its field tests. After launching in a single neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington and then adding a larger site in Irvine, California last August, Scout is now undergoing trials in Atlanta, Georgia and Franklin, Tennessee, Amazon announced today.

More and more companies are trying to diversify their product lines in order to be able to adapt to changes in the market. In an increasingly globalized and everchanging fruit and vegetable sector growers, packhouses and processors are looking for flexibility for their daily operations. ProEx Food LLC.…

Many packhouses are looking to reduce the amount of forklifts operating on the floor and for that reason Somerset West-based Gossamer Packaging Machinery have designed an automated shuttle car for the circulation of empty and full pallets or bins without the use of pallet jacks or forklifts. The shuttle…

“We get calls everyday now, from people looking for greenhouses to grow their own food or to form cooperations with neighbours,” says Erick Recors with Fullbloom Greenhouse. Horticulture is a blooming market in the US at the moment. The country tries to source food as locally as possible, especially…

Potatonewstoday.com shared two videos that are really worth watching for those who are interested in what’s happening in the technology developments in the ag industry.

SANANBIO, one of the world’s largest indoor farming technology providers announces the availability of its unmanned vertical farming system, a.k.a. UPLIFT, to growers globally.  “Pour your seeds in the seeder and do nothing but expect fresh veggies to be harvested in a matter of days,” said Zhan Zhuo, co-founder…

Palletizing bags in the tightest of spaces is always a challenge for automation engineers. Bremen-based company AKON Robotics has delivered a robot bag palletizing system to a customer in Austria, where a new gripper technology for bag palletizing is used in addition to the adaptation to the confined…

A Japanese chain of sushi restaurants is using an AI-powered app to assess the quality of tuna — a key step in the preparation of sushi that traditionally requires years of training from experienced human buyers. But can it really replace a human’s fish sense?

The app, named Tuna Scope, was developed by Japanese advertising firm Dentsu Inc. It uses machine learning algorithms trained on thousands of images of the cross-sections of tuna tails, a cut of the meat that can reveal much about a fish’s constitution.

The app was trained on thousands of images of tuna tails

From a single picture, the app grades the tuna on a five-point scale based on visual characteristics like the sheen of the flesh and the layering of fat. For an experienced...

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An Israeli company that has created an autonomous pollinating robot has started its first trials in Australia. Arugga AI Farming is hoping its technology can transform Australia's greenhouse farming sector, especially greenhouse tomatoes, which are currently pollinated by hand. Chief executive Iddo…

Ball valves for irrigation used to be manually operated, but nowadays this is increasingly more automated. Someone who knows all about water technology in the greenhouse, is Hein Braaksma. "Everything which can be automated, is more and more often automated. The water-technical installation in a…

Frontier IP, a specialist in commercialising intellectual property, today announces that Robert Bosch Limited ("Bosch") has entered into an agreement to work with portfolio company Fieldwork Robotics ("Fieldwork" or the "Company") to accelerate the development of its novel robot technology to harvest…

Nature's Pride, in collaboration with Bizerba Netherlands, has taken a huge step towards reducing waste. By installing an LDI PAC8, a label dispenser from Bizerba - with customer-specific adaptations - Nature's Pride has the absolute first for this solution across Europe. Waste reductionAs a supplier of 230…

When UK farmers found themselves short-staffed due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, the government launched a campaign urging the public to cover the shortfall and “Pick for Britain”. With the recruitment campaign struggling to convert applicants into farm workers and Brexit already disrupting the supply…

The corona pandemic has once again demonstrated how dependent agriculture is on seasonal workers, but Norwegian growers may get help from robots next year. For Norwegian growers, the development of autonomous robots cannot move quickly enough, especially now that many of them are struggling to find…

A new paper presents the development of a cost-effective automatic system for greenhouse environment control. The architectural and functional features were analyzed in the context of the realization of a controlled-environment agricultural system through all its stages: installation, deployment of the…

Greenhouse automation has come a long way in the past two decades. Give it another two decades, and it may completely overshadow the human element in the greenhouse. At least, that's a conclusion you might draw when looking at the results of the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge and the implications of it…

Food safety has always been a concern in the fresh-cut industry. For ready-to-eat vegetables such as lettuce, the entire cleaning process usually takes 2 to 3 minutes, which is too long for conventional cleaning lines. Therefore, a cleaning line with an extended launder is necessary to ensure the…

It takes decades for a produce processor to build up its brand, but only seconds to ruin it. A product recall traced back to contamination in your packaging equipment can destroy one's credibility overnight. That’s why selecting the right vertical form fill seal bagger (VFFS) is critical to the success…

When UK farmers found themselves short-staffed due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, the government launched a campaign urging the public to cover the shortfall and “Pick for Britain”. With the recruitment campaign struggling to convert applicants into farm workers and Brexit already disrupting the supply…

Increasingly scarce irrigation resources and labor availability are key components impacting the sustainability of the New Mexico chilli pepper industry. New Mexico State University’s Center of Excellence in Sustainable Food and Agricultural Systems is providing a grant for the first year of research in…

Researchers at WSU and Pennsylvania State University are intent on creating a robotic system that will artificially pollinate fruit tree flowers due to threats to natural pollination worldwide. The robotic system will be able to detect where flowers are using cameras and a computational system and algorithm.…

The Dutch company, Eco-containerwash, has brought an automated container cleaner onto the market. It can clean containers faster, safer, and more sustainably. Marine Systems developed it. "Several years ago, a container depot asked if we could automate container cleaning. There was no machine for that,"…

In a monthly feature, Craig Stauffer of Vanguard International writes about an industry topic. This month, Vanguard sheds light on how COVID-19 is impacting the fresh produce industry, with labor shortage pressure on growers feeling even more prominent than usual. Stauffers's feature is below: "The…