Development of a Small-Scale Automatic Colour Sorter Prototype Machine

The ability to automatically differentiate and sort coloured objects is critical to any industry because, in the manufacturing sector, manual sorting is tedious and labour-intensive. Reducing the need for manual sorting is one of the major challenges for automation systems, and the development of sorting machines plays a major role in solving the current sorting problem. The objective of this paper is to develop a small-scale automatic colour sorter machine that can automatically separate objects according to their colour. This colour sorter machine was designed using CATIA V5 software and used an Arduino Uno as the microcontroller. As for the colour sensing and identification task, the TCS34725 colour sensor is used. The colour detection calibration method was used to obtain the RGB value of the object. The RGB value obtained was used for the experimental validation process. The result was verified based on the colour sorting machine’s performance. The performance of the sorting machine built was presented and discussed. The result shows that the machine is between 96.6 and 99.0% accurate.