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New Optical Sorter for Particulate Foods

Key Technology's Compass optical sorter utilizes multiple sensors to accurately detect defects and rejects from all sides in frozen fruits, nuts, and other small foods.

Transcript
Transcript

I'm Bret Larreau. I'm a senior sales director here at Key Technology. We're having a COMPASS Optical Sorter that has new technology here at the show.

It includes different sensors on multiple sides of the product, and the sensor groups are using shortwave infrared, and red, green, blue, and infrared cameras, all combined with our Pixel Fusion.

The cameras are in the two pods. There's another upper pod and the lower pod. They're looking at the product as it comes down a chute behind these plates. Accepted product goes out the bottom. Any defective product or foreign objects comes out this way.

Notice the open construction. There are no horizontal surfaces all because we are really after the utmost in sanitation. Ease of sanitation and also just general sanitary levels. Everything is designed with full waterproof IP67 protection.

We've got an integrated vibratory shaker here up at the top that feeds product in a uniform layer to the sorting system. And on this side you can actually see the foreground lighting in white, the background lighting for the opposite camera in blue. The line of sight is here, and the two cameras converge at this point and are seeing both sides of the product as it is then ejected, if it's bad, by a row of ejectors here.

And then back on this side, again, notice the openness. Sanitary construction. And here on the user interface, we've got a blueberry example here. We're looking at different colors of blueberries. The good product is green. The cyan is going to be a green-blueberry defect. We can identify the stems. And we can remove all of those along with any types of foreign objects.

Easy to train this to whatever attribute you need. You can do that in just a few minutes. That's it for the COMPASS.

Yeah, this works well on any particulate objects: raisins, nuts, dehydrated fruit, dried fruit, frozen vegetables, especially frozen fruit. Anything that can slide down a chute.





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