Development and preliminary evaluation of a new bin filler for apple harvesting and infield sorting

Authors: ZHANG, ZHAO - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA); POTHULA, ANAND KUMAR - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA); Lu, Renfu

Submitted to: Transactions of the ASABE
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 10/10/2017
Publication Date: 12/1/2017
Citation: Zhang, Z., Pothula, A., Lu, R. 2017. Development and preliminary evaluation of a new bin filler for apple harvesting and infield sorting. Transactions of the ASABE. 60(6):1839-1849.

Interpretive Summary: The bin filler plays a critical role for filling the fruit container or bin with apples coming from the sorting system of the self-propelled apple harvest and infield sorting (HIS) machine that is being developed in our laboratory. Two major technical challenges in developing the bin filler are limited space in the HIS machine and high throughput. A literature review showed that despite many different types of bin fillers currently available for infield use, none of them is suitable for the HIS machine because of their large size, use of the bin rotating design concept, and high unit cost. A new bin filling technology was thus developed in our laboratory for use with the HIS machine. The new bin filler mainly consists of a mechanical system with the pinwheel design and an automatic control system. A key innovation for the mechanical system is the use of two foam rollers to catch freely falling apples, which has greatly simplified the bin filler design and also made the system compact and lower in cost. The control system uses a microcontroller and three sensors to monitor and measure the status of apples filling the bin as well as the rotational speed of the pinwheel. A program code was developed to record and process the data of the three sensors in real-time to achieve automatic control of the bin filling. Laboratory tests with ‘Gala’ apples demonstrated that 97% of apples that had been handled by the new bin filler were rated ‘Extra Fancy’ grade, which has exceeded the industry’s requirement for bruising damage to apples. The new bin filler will be incorporated with the apple harvest and infield sorting machine, and it can also be used for other harvest platforms and in the packinghouse.

Technical Abstract: The bin filler, which is used for filling the fruit container or bin with apples coming from the sorting system, plays a critical role for the self-propelled apple harvest and infield sorting (HIS) machine that is being developed in our laboratory. Two major technical challenges in developing the bin filler are limited space in the HIS machine and high throughput. A literature review showed that despite many different types of bin fillers currently available for infield use, none of them is suitable for the HIS machine because of their large size, use of the bin rotating design concept, and high unit cost. Effort has thus been made on the development of new bin filling technology for use with the HIS machine. The new bin filler mainly consisted of a mechanical system with the pinwheel design and an automatic control system. A key innovation for the mechanical system is the use of two foam rollers to catch freely falling apples, which has greatly simplified the bin filler design and also made the system compact and lower in cost. The control system was mainly composed of an onboard Arduino microcontroller and three sensors (one infrared sensor and two Hall Effect sensors), to monitor and measure the status of apples filling the bin as well as the rotational speed of the pinwheel. A program code was developed for the Arduino microcontroller to record and process the data of the three sensors in real-time to achieve automatic control of the bin filling. Laboratory tests with ‘Gala’ apples demonstrated that 97% of apples that had been handled by the new bin filler were rated ‘Extra Fancy’ grade, which has exceeded the industry’s requirement for bruising damage to apples.