Farmsort.one, a potato sorting system developed within the Grimme Group, is using industrial cameras from IDS Imaging Development Systems to combine size and quality grading in a single processing step.

Developed by schmiede.one, the Grimme Group’s innovation lab, the system is designed for small and medium-sized agricultural businesses and can sort both washed and unwashed potatoes into as many as five grades.

At the centre of the system is a 1.5-metre inspection section along which each potato is captured several times. Depending on the configuration, two or three IDS industrial cameras monitor the product flow from different angles.

Rather than relying on each tuber rotating at a single inspection point, Farmsort.one uses repeated inspections and controlled movement along the conveyor. The approach is intended to maintain sorting performance when soil or foreign material is present.

“We did not want a spot assessment like those used in many conventional systems on the market, but rather a controlled inspection over a defined distance,” said Jan Kiwitt, Project Manager at schmiede.one. “The combination of a guided conveyor system and multiple inspections enables reliable detection of quality characteristics while maintaining a consistent throughput.”

The system has a stated maximum throughput of two tonnes per hour, while IDS said farms typically achieve between 1.4 and 1.7 tonnes per hour under operating conditions.

Depending on the configuration, Farmsort.one uses two or three IDS U3-3270CP Rev. 2.2 USB 3.0 Vision cameras. One is used to classify potatoes and identify foreign material such as stones as well as defects including wireworm holes. Another tracks individual tubers along the conveyor, working with a rotary encoder to determine their position and allow out-of-specification produce to be removed.

Potatoes can be separated by both size and quality during the same pass, with defective and oversized tubers directed to separate outlets while Grade A produce continues in the main product stream.

IDS said 73% of Farmsort.one users have eliminated manual re-sorting. The company also said the system is now operating on more than 50 farms.

The modular design allows additional sorting outlets and cameras to be added later, while remote monitoring is available for adjusting sorting parameters. Schmiede.one is also investigating further defect-detection methods, including monocular depth analysis and multispectral inspection in the NIR and SWIR ranges.