The 27-year-old Qin Bo operates 4 computers for apple sorting. The efficiency of one hour is 100 times that of manual labor."On the first day at work, I looked at the bad fruits sorted by the machine. I was a little skeptical. I picked a dozen of them and cut them to see that there was no error. After that, I trusted my robot colleagues very much." Qin Bo said.
The liberated manpower was put into more delicate work: bagging and packing the graded apples.
Qin Bo used to work in a logistics and warehousing company and has a good understanding of the Apple industry. He introduced that there are currently three methods for sorting: manual sorting, ordinary sorting equipment, and digital sorting' equipment.
Manual selection relies on human eyes and experience to identify the size, good or bad. The sorting of ordinary machines equipped by industry merchants has main functions of taking pictures and weighing.
The sorting equipment in Xi’an warehouse is 4-channel, and 16-channel packaging production line is connected behind it. When the machine started, 10 tons were selected in an hour. The skilled hand picks about 200 kg in 1 hour. 10 tons requires 100 people to work for 1 hour at the same time.
For an apple to become a commodity, it needs to go through the main steps of feeding, cleaning, grading, bagging and boxing, and sealing. The whole process has been maintained at 90 seconds. In 90 seconds, the robot completes the other processes except bagging and boxing. The loading area is the first step of Apple's digitalization. The work flow here is the robotic arm loading, apple cleaning, drying, and then entering the sorting link.
