Saw a robot arm sorting tomatoes at a packing house in Salinas and it changed how I think about this stuff
I was touring a produce packing house in Salinas for work and they had this AI vision system grading tomatoes on a line. It was sorting 80 tomatoes a minute and catching blemishes I could barely see. The guy running it said they cut their waste by 30% in the first quarter. Has anyone else seen this kind of thing out in the field?
Worked a summer at a berry farm in Watsonville and my buddy still does maintenance there. They brought in one of those vision sorters for strawberries last year and he was sure it was gonna get him fired. Turns out the machine kept flagging stuff it thought was bruised when it was just shadow from the conveyor, so they had to keep two people on the line anyway to double check it, ha. He said it did get better after a few months of the company feeding it more pics, but it was rough at first. Still saved them a ton on waste once it figured things out, so I get why the packing house you saw is bragging about 30%.