Design and construction of color sensor based optical sorting machine

Quality plays significant role to stay competitive in the market, especially in industries that many new products enter and leave themarket. The basic requirement is to ensure that only products meet the quality standards can be released, and this is possible by implementing high-quality inspection to sort the products. However, manual sorting of bulk items is very difficult due to a large number of inspected items. Thus, automatic optical color sorting machine could be an answer to solve the problem. The aim of the study is to design and construct a color sensor based optical sorting machine and was carried out through several stages; problem identification, research purpose formulation, literature review, machine requirements determination, machine and software design, machine construction, commissioning, machine capability testing, and conclusion. Some capabilities of final assembled and programmed machine were tested, from color identification, ejection, and sorting. The experiments show that the machine is capable of correctly detecting 74.75% of good materials, without false detection of the bad materials, while on the other hand the machine successfully ejecting 94.02% of the materials marked to be ejected. The sorting capability of this machine reached recovery efficiency of 67.41%, and defect removal efficiency of 85.07%.