QualityGrader Receives Upgrades From Flikweert Vision
The QualityGrader was introduced by Dutch specialty machinery maker Flikweert Vision three years ago. A true revolution in optical sorting began with this new equipment, the product of painstaking technological research. Consequently, the Dutch seed potato industry quickly selected Flikweert Vision’s optical sorting devices.
To get the greatest outcome, the organization searched for a QualityGrader update with more cameras and greater processing power, which significantly improved accuracy and capacity.
“Our ambition with the QualityGrader is to eliminate 100% of the manual sorting work for potatoes […], and with this upgrade, we are one step closer to making this ambition a reality. The camera upgrade, with double the number of cameras, is integral to this. These extra cameras mean that all products are monitored by at least two cameras. This means that defects are always clearly visible, which is not always the case when the product is only recorded from one position. Additionally, the potatoes or onions are assessed not Rive but at least ten times. Doubling the number of cameras thus provides a significant improvement in quality assessment,” Martijn Flikweert, co-owner of Flikweert Vision, mentioned.
More processing power is needed to handle the larger volume of data. For this reason, a computational power increase is available as a separate module, giving the QualityGrader six times greater processing power. By doing this, the QualityGrader’s capacity is more than doubled and it is prepared for the future.
Additional software development possibilities are created by these updates. This is the next step toward an autonomous quality rating, according to Martijn Flikweert.
“We have recently significantly expanded our R&D team, and therefore expect to continue making useful advances. Our ambition is no secret: we want to fully automate the quality grading of potatoes and onions worldwide, and we will not stop until this goal is achieved,” Flikweert declared.
Many customers – including Kraggenburg, Netherlands-based Klaver Koeling, a producer of seed potatoes – are already utilizing the upgraded equipment after they underwent intensive testing. Jan Mussche, a representative of the firm, is happy with the upgraded QualityGraders.
“Due to the noticeable improvement in accuracy, we are convinced that this is a major leap forward in sorting potatoes without human labor. We would never want to go back to conventional grading. This is the future!” he concluded.
