Automated strawberry capping
Strawberries that will be processed and frozen have to be free of the calyx and stem. Capping by hand in the field raises labor cost, and labor shortages threaten growers who supply the frozen industry.
Capping at the plant would be cleaner and safer, and it would recover more fruit, if a fast machine could do it. Attempts over about eighty years had not produced a machine that was both reliable and worth the cost. With support from the California Strawberry Commission, the lab designed, built, and tested a high-speed single-line orienting and capping prototype, using computer-aided design, mechatronics, and real-time imaging.
The machine was licensed to Atlas Pacific, and commercial units have been built and deployed. Dennis Sadowski, the lab’s development engineer, co-designed the prototype and fabricated it. He describes the machine in the video below.