Development and Testing of Automatic Grading Machine for Citrus

Abstract

Citrus is an important fruits in lndonesia and its production increases from year to year because citrus is one of the fruits supported by national fruits development program. However, postharvest equipment for citrus is very limited, leading to low postharvest technology utilization. The objective of this research was to develop and test a real-time grading machine for citrus using an image sensor and processing unit for quality evaluation of the acquired image of the citrus being evaluated. The grading machine consists of a rotating fruit feeder, a belt conveyor, a color CCD camera placed in an image acquisition chamber, four channels fo pass four different grades of citrus, four collecting boxes for graded citrus, a logic control panel, a computer with an image frame grabber, and a software to run all the installed hardware. The rotating fruits feeder and the conveyor are actuated by two different electical motors. The constructed machine then was tested to observe if all the hardware worked well, and the result of citrus classification were also observed visually to determine the pertormance of the machine. The result of testing showed that the machine could work propefly as it was design, and the classification of citrus could be done based on the size as current manual work, or even based on the size and color of skin as an improvement. However, the speed of the machine is still very low and some problem with the feeder is still happening, especially when citrus variation in size was big.