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Name of Company: Vizier Systems (Pty) Limited

Name of Project: Grapesizer

Project Description:

Vizier Systems (Pty) Limited was established in 1992 to produce qualification systems for the perishable goods industry.

Table grapes are classified and sorted in terms of grape cultivar, ripeness, berry size, colour, bunch weight, straggliness, marks and unevenness. Mostly, classification and packing have been done manually. Whereas grape cultivar, ripeness, straggliness, marks and unevenness are easily spotted during the initial sorting stages, the berry size and colour classification are difficult to do visually and may result in large variances within a packed carton.

The bunch sizes also vary significantly and make packing difficult. To achieve a weight of exactly 4.5 kg per carton is virtually impossible and as a result the average carton weight is typically 4.7 kg. This overweight factor contributes to an overall yearly loss of R62 million to table grape producers.

Vizier has designed and developed a grape conveyer belt that is able to transfer and discharge grapes without human intervention and without any damage to the grapes. When a grape bunch is to be discharged on a packing belt, the particular cup dropping mechanism is activated and the cup is gradually lowered.

At the heart of the Grapesizer packing line is an imaging and weighing unit with associated control software that has been developed to guide the packing operation. Each packing belt is assigned a packing specification in terms of grape diameter and colour. After a bunch of grapes has been imaged and weighed, the control system assigns it to the correct packing belt. If the control software determines that the assigned bunch will result in a suboptimal weight for the carton, it will reassign the bunch to another packing belt of the same specification.