<p></p><p>Brown-skinned almonds pour like a waterfall from one conveyor belt to another and pass under a strip of bright lights. A robotic head poised over the belt waits for any almond-size rocks, twigs or discoloured nuts to move into range, then darting down, right and left, vacuums up the culls and airlifts them to the reject bin. The four lines of robotic nut sorters, the first of their kind in California or anywhere else, have allowed nut processor Travaille & Phippen to trim its work force and provide the opportunity to greatly expand production through mechanization.</p> <p>After installation of the sorters began in September, the goal was to process 100,000 pounds of almonds in a typical 12-hour shift. The machines proved capable of handling up to 150,000 pounds, said David Phippen, a co-owner. And they've displaced a good deal of the manual sorting previously required. "For Travaille & Phippen, we used to have 80 employees; we have something less than 50 now," Phippen said. Not only did it cut labour costs, but it kept the company from having to meet Affordable Care Act health coverage requirements. </p><p>While he is under an agreement not to discuss what he paid for the equipment - a robotic pick-and-sort system from Bratney Co. - he said the cost savings should offset his capital investment within four years. </p><p>Travaille & Phippen also supported the development process, providing almonds for initial testing, then hosting a prototype machine in a back warehouse two years ago. The toughest problem was getting the machine to consistently sort out brown almond hulls from brown almond nuts.</p> <p>"The challenge that we had was trying to use conventional grey scale and colour cameras to sort the foreign material out of the almonds," said Brian Rhodes, a Midwest director for FANUC America Corp., one of the largest robotics producers in the country and which provided the mechanism that does the physical sorting. It didn't do a good enough job. That led us to a different type of vision technology called hyperspectral imaging." The system, from Resonon Inc. of Bozeman, Mont., uses a prism to break light into its component colours. </p><p>"Really simply put, any other camera can see red, green and blue. What we see is every colour in the spectrum," said Eric Pflueger, Northern California sales manager for Vogel Sales, a Bratney subsidiary. "Anybody else's camera is going to give you three pieces of information. We're going to give you 240 pieces of information for every pixel." The robots can move faster than human sorters, picking out up to 220 culls per minute, Pfluger said. But it also can be more patient than a human. </p><p>The Travaille system was really the first sorter with hyperspectral vision versus three-colour vision, Pflueger said. California's almond industry, however, is no place to rest on yesterday's technology. </p><p>In the dozen years since 2002, it has doubled total production from 1 billion pounds to 2 billion pounds of nut meats per year. Yield per acre also has risen over the same period, going from an average of less than 2,000 pounds per acre to about 2,400 pound per acre today.</p> <p>Besides improvements in growing and processing, consumers continue to demand better quality as well as higher food safety standards, Phippen said. </p><p> </p><br><p></p>