January/February 2024 - 12

START-OF-LINE
Eriez's metal detectors are used in industries including food
processing, packaging, textiles and pharmaceuticals. The
equipment is designed with easily navigable controls and a
large color interface. Photo courtesy of Eriez.
" It actually made it easier, " he said. " Say you've got a 10-inch
long piece of corn. If the defect's on the very end, that's where
the robot wanted to go. Trying to pick an ear of corn up from
the end is very difficult. With AI and then the almonds, we
see the almond, we see the defect, and then go to the middle
of the almond. So that was a big help. "
Another key resource-enhancing component of the PRAIRIE
SCP-2100, Pflueger said, is its ability to separate defects into
three categories.
" Most sorting pieces of equipment just sort everything into
one bin. We take the individual rejects and separate them, "
he said.
That process separates rejects into trash, nuts to be sold
for milk or candy, and products to be sold for animal food.
" It saves (customers) a nickel a pound later, " Pflueger said.
" If you pick out a few hundred pounds of nuts a day, at the end
of the season, you've got a half million pounds or a million
pounds to re-run. At a nickel a pound, well ... "
The three-way separation also saves time, Pflueger said,
and labor costs, as humans are no longer required to perform
repetitive tasks.
A NEW KIND OF WORKER
With companies competing for workers - especially in
California, where the minimum wage increased to $16 an
hour in January - the jobs rendered unnecessary by AI
are ones that are difficult to fill anyway, Pflueger said.
12 JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2 024
" What it does, though, is create a higher-paying job, "
Pflueger said. " Somebody's got to learn how to use this.
Somebody's got to be able to operate it. Somebody's got to
learn some of the maintenance. There won't be as many
jobs, and that's where we save the labor.
" Now we're going to have somebody that's a little bit higher
up the pay scale that's going to be in charge of the system and
keeping it running. "
Pflueger pointed out, however, that that system - contrary
to some impressions - doesn't actually learn the same way
humans do.
" It figures things out on its own, and by that, what I mean
is that we teach it something, " he said. " It's going to try and fit
whatever you push through it into one of the boxes you've given
it to choose from. It will take all the data points and get it to
the box closest to what it thinks it is. If it's wrong, it'll look for
a different box. That's the learning part of it.
" People are afraid of this stuff - 'It's going to take over
the world!' No. It's only going to do what people tell it to do. "
START-OF-LINE ADVANCES
Pennsylvania-based separation technology company Eriez
is also a pioneer in AI-assisted sorting.
In 2019, Eriez debuted the NanoRanch AI Sorter, which uses
vision to identify and sort a customizable range of nonferrous
materials. The sorter provides greater than 95% accuracy
when the machine is trained with samples, according to the
January/February 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January/February 2024
