Design and Testing of a Solar Powered Automated Fruit and Vegetable Sorter

The Middle East and Dubai are specifically well known for their large number of Hypermarkets, Supermarkets, and Groceries, generating a huge demand for high quality consumables such as vegetables and fruits. Modern Retailing will benefit much from offering fruit and vegetables sorted by quality (based on physical characteristics such as weight, size, color, shape, smell, etc.)—an essential step in post-harvest management for offering quality agricultural produce to the consumer. The proposed work focuses on sorting fruits and vegetables based on Color and Shape. It uses a Convolutional Neural Network Architecture (Deep Learning) for Fruit/Vegetable Sorting (Inception V3). High torque geared DC motors are used to operate the Conveyor belts. Graphical User Interface (GUI) is to be created and incorporated to make the system user friendly. Raspberry Pi 3B has been used to interface the entire system. System is programmed using Python 3 with Open CV and TensorFlow modules. System has been designed to use Solar Energy to make it sustainable. System is designed to sort 30 fruits/vegetables in a minute.