Image processing based chocolate picking and packaging system by industrial robotic arm

The two most important issues in the packaging process in the food sector are seen as hygiene and speed. While the packaging process is carried out in accordance with the hygiene rules and quickly, quality must also be ensured. The idea that providing hygiene, speed and quality together in packaging can only be realized with mechanization suitable for this process comes to the fore. Thanks to this mechanization process, it is foreseen that it will be possible to increase hygiene, speed and quality by reducing the human factor in production in food packaging, and to increase both quality products and commercial profits. In this thesis, a chocolate packaging system has been proposed that increases hygiene and quality while speeding up production by reducing the human factor in food packaging. In this system, an industrial camera was used instead of the human eye so that the robot arm could collect the chocolate, and it was aimed to detect different chocolates flowing from the line with the help of image processing. The features of the image of the chocolates in motion on the production line were sent to the robot arm. Using the incoming information, the robotic arm collected the detected chocolates without stopping the conveyor. USB camera was used in image processing. The images taken from the USB camera were processed using the OpenCV library in the Python environment, the center X and center Y position, angle and type information of each detected chocolate firstly to the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and then to the robot arm via Modbus TCP/IP communication. The robot arm was transferred to collect the product. In these studies, manual packaging processes and the newly developed system were compared in terms of hygiene, speed and quality. It has been observed that the products obtained in the developed robotic system are 90% better in terms of hygiene, 23% in terms of speed and 30% in terms of quality compared to those produced manually. Thus, it has been seen that the robotic system makes a positive contribution to both human health and the company commercially.