Automate and Control LTD

Tag: quality

  • Automate and Control’s AI Driven Machine Vision Systems for the Food Industry. How does Machine Learning benefit our customers.

    Revolutionizing Food Industry Operations with Chaos AI Vision Systems

    Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Seamless, Future-Proof Automation

    At Automate and Control, we are excited to introduce our cutting-edge Chaos AI Vision Systems tailored for the food industry. These systems are not just another technological gimmick; they represent the very core of artificial intelligence integrated into robust machine vision solutions.

    AI at the Core: Future-Proofing Your Operations

    The term “AI” often buzzes through the tech landscape, yet at Automate and Control, it signifies a profound transformation. Our Chaos AI Vision Systems are built around a core of advanced AI, ensuring that they are not just solutions for today but are future-proof for the evolving demands of the food industry. With our AI-driven systems, the dependency on highly trained vision software engineers is a thing of the past. Now, even operators with basic technical know-how can set up and manage complex applications, thanks to our intuitive, machine-learning enhanced setup systems.

    Empowering Operators with Simple, Powerful Tools

    Our vision systems come equipped with user-friendly interfaces that allow operators to easily configure and deploy new applications. This shift from engineer-dependent setups to operator-led configurations reduces setup times and operational downtime, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing costs. The built-in machine learning capabilities ensure that the system continuously learns and adapts, improving its accuracy and functionality with each use.

    Comprehensive Capabilities for the Food Industry

    The Chaos AI Vision Systems are designed to handle a wide array of tasks critical to the food industry:

    • Variable Data Checking: Ensure all product data matches across batches.
    • Random Packed Product Identification: Easily identify and sort products regardless of their packing arrangement.
    • Barcode and QR Code Inspection: Maintain accuracy in code reading to support tracking and distribution.
    • Quality Grading: Automatically assess product quality to ensure only the best items reach consumers.
    • Anomaly Detection: Quickly spot and address deviations from the norm, preventing potential issues before they escalate.
    • Labeling and Date Coding: Check for missing or incorrect labels and date codes, crucial for regulatory compliance and consumer safety.

    Robust Remote Support for Uninterrupted Operations

    Understanding the critical nature of food industry operations, our Chaos AI Vision Systems are backed by comprehensive remote support. This ensures that any operational hiccups can be swiftly and efficiently resolved, maintaining high uptime and productivity. Our expert team can remotely diagnose and rectify issues, reducing the need for on-site visits and further ensuring that your operations run smoothly around the clock.

    Seamless Integration with Upstream and Downstream Equipment

    At Automate and Control, we understand that the effectiveness of our Chaos AI Vision Systems extends beyond their standalone capabilities. Integration with existing production lines and systems is crucial for maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in the food industry. Our vision systems are designed with advanced protocol support to seamlessly communicate with both upstream and downstream equipment, such as sealing, coding, and weighing machines.

    Advanced Protocol Support for Diverse Equipment

    Our Chaos AI Vision Systems support a multitude of protocols, ensuring they can easily connect with various types of production equipment. This interoperability is key to streamlining production processes and enhancing the synchronization between different stages of production. Whether it’s integrating with older legacy systems or the latest in automation technology, our systems are equipped to handle:

    • Industrial Network Protocols: Including but not limited to Ethernet/IP, Modbus TCP, PROFIBUS, and PROFINET, ensuring that our systems can communicate effectively across the most widely used industrial networks.
    • Standard Communication Interfaces: Support for USB, RS-232, RS-485, and wireless communications facilitates flexible connectivity options.

    Enhanced Production Line Efficiency

    By integrating our Chaos AI Vision Systems with sealing machines, for instance, operators can ensure that once the AI system identifies and confirms the quality of packaged goods, the information can directly trigger the sealing process without manual intervention. Similarly, integration with coding and weighing equipment allows for a streamlined workflow where products are inspected, weighed, and coded in one smooth, continuous process, reducing handling times and minimizing the risk of errors.

    Real-Time Data Sharing and Process Optimization

    Our integrated systems allow for real-time data sharing between equipment, enabling immediate adjustments and process optimization. For example, if the vision system detects a discrepancy in product weight, this information can be instantly relayed to the weighing equipment to re-calibrate and correct future measurements. This capability not only enhances accuracy but also significantly improves the overall productivity and efficiency of the production line.

    Customizable Integration Solutions

    Recognizing that each production facility has unique needs, Automate and Control offers customizable integration solutions. Our team works closely with clients to assess their specific equipment and integration requirements, ensuring that the implementation of our Chaos AI Vision Systems enhances overall operational flow and meets the specific needs of each facility.

    Conclusion: A Smarter Way to Automate

    At Automate and Control, we believe in leveraging technology to make industrial operations not just automated but smartly automated. Our Chaos AI Vision Systems embody this philosophy by providing the food industry with a powerful, intelligent tool that is simple to use, future-proof, and capable of handling multiple complex tasks efficiently. Embrace the future of food industry automation with us and ensure your operations are not just running, but running at their optimal best.

    With Chaos AI Vision Systems, the promise of a fully integrated, highly efficient production line is now a reality. By supporting a multitude of protocols and offering seamless integration with a variety of upstream and downstream equipment, our systems not only enhance individual processes but also transform the entire production ecosystem. Step into the future of integrated automation with us and experience unparalleled efficiency and productivity in your food industry operations.

    Visit us at automateandcontrol.com to learn more about how our Chaos AI Vision Systems can transform your food industry operations today.

  • bioClass® The new standard in detection and quality inspection of poultry fillets.

    bioClass® The new standard in detection and quality inspection of poultry fillets.

    Is Poultry Fillet Woody Breast Syndrome a Health Hazard?

    Many consumers are beginning to ask this question. It is believed not, but it is detrimental to the consumers experience of the product if not detected before consumption. Overall this has an economic effect on the poultry industry with consumers seeking other products due to a poor experience and lack of knowledge of this issue.

    Poultry producers worldwide struggle with WBS. This condition occurs in poultry and is a muscle disorder that primarily affects the breast muscles. Often, there is inflammation in the breast muscle and connective tissues, which can lead to a stringy muscle appearance. an increase in connective tissue and breast muscle inflammation, causing a reduction in muscle mass and therefore a pronounced water-holding capacity.

    Knowing the quality of the final product going out of your plant is one of the most important parameters of poultry inspection. Traditional methods have been developed over numerous years and proven very effective in detecting contamination, visual defects and unappealing breast inclusions. Hyperspectral woody breast inspection is taking this to the next level, creating greater opportunity for making significant improvements to your processing line efficiencies by removing manual inspection from your process lines.

    bioClass® the world’s first patent pending hyperspectral woody breast syndrome (WBS) inspection system in accordance with the international standards to go beyond X-Ray inspection, what more could you ask for? In a word, none. bioClass® our hyperspectral woody breast inspection system can be used as a complementary tool to traditional X-Ray imaging for a step forward in product quality control and process efficiency.

    bioClass® a complete inspection system for poultry breast meat. An innovative hyperspectral system that can measure color and texture to detect surface contamination, and a spectroscopic scanner that detects woody breast myopathy, blood spots, bone, skin and fat using target signatures recognised by the software.

    For More Info on our system https://www.automateandcontrol.com/woody-breast-inspection-poultry/

    QIS-4P meat and poultry inspection systems from Automate and Control LTD


    Wooden Breast Poultry Inspection System

    For more information on Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat visit.

    https://www.kosfaj.org/archive/view_article?pid=kosfa-38-5-835

    For more information on automated poultry inspection systems, contact

    Automate and Control LTD – sales@automateandcontrol.co.uk

      

  • How we Protect Against the Cost of Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat – Including Woody Breast / White Striping.

    How we Protect Against the Cost of Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat – Including Woody Breast and White Striping.

    #foodindustry #inspection #foodscience #foodmanufacturing #security #foodsafety #freshproduce #foodsafety #TACCP #audit #Health #planning #Monitoring #continuous_improvement #Manufacturing #hyperspectral #hyperspectralimaging #foodandbeveragemanufacturing #food #business #foodsecurity #foodinspection
    Woody / Wooden Chicken Breast Meat and White Striping is estimated to cost the Poultry Industry between 200-1,000M USD per year.

    With consumers taking to social media to share their experiences, brand protection is more important than ever. Automate and Control LTD have the most advanced solution on the market to ensure your consumers don’t suffer a poor quality experience.

    “Wooden breast” describes quality problems caused by abnormal muscles in a small portion of chicken. This condition makes the chicken breasts hard to the touch, and the colour is usually light and the texture is poor. Wooden breast will not bring any health or food safety hazards to people, and the welfare of the chicken itself will not be negatively affected.

    What causes the “woody breast”?
    Do larger, faster raised chickens cause “woody breasts”?

    The cause of the “woody breast” is not yet clear, and researchers are working to determine the cause and possible solutions. The poultry industry will invest more than a quarter of a million dollars in four independent research projects of independent universities and the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, while also collaborating with geneticists, veterinarians, and animal scientists to gain insight into this kind of muscle disease and remedy it.

    Is “Wooden Brest” a threat to my health? Is this common?

    No, chicken with “woody/wooden breast” will not pose a threat to consumers’ health. The concern about “woody breasts” is the quality (texture and appearance) of the meat, not the health or nutritional content of the meat. All chicken companies check these quality problems in their processing plants. This situation is sporadic and only affects a small part of the poultry.

    How do chicken producers currently deal with “woody-breasted chicken”?

    In addition to strict Food Safety Inspection equipment such as X-rays and metal detectors the chicken companies also have processing plant employees who inspect each piece of breast meat in the factory. And if any quality issues such as “wooden breasts” are found, meat is usually transferred for use elsewhere.

    The issue with manual poultry breast inspection is fatigue of the employee carrying out this process. Early in the shift the accuracy may be in the high 80% dropping off over the day to maybe around the 60% mark. With our Poultry Quality Inspection System QIS-4P you receive 100% inspection with an average of >95% accuracy.

    Using Online, High Speed, CHEMICAL COLOUR ANALYSIS, not only does our system inspect for Woody Breast it can also inspect for other contaminants not wanted in a ready to cook ready or fast food product, such as small fragments of bone, fat, skin, blood spots all that may impair the final product when consumed by your customers.

    Severe woody breast automatic inspection

    QIS-4P meat and poultry inspection systems from Automate and Control LTD


    Wooden Breast Poultry Inspection System

    For more information on Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat visit.

    https://www.kosfaj.org/archive/view_article?pid=kosfa-38-5-835

    For more information on automated poultry inspection systems, contact

    Automate and Control LTD – sales@automateandcontrol.co.uk

  • How we Protect Against the Cost of Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat – Including Woody Breast and White Striping.

    How we Protect Against the Cost of Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat – Including Woody Breast and White Striping.

    Woody / Wooden Chicken Breast Meat and White Striping is estimated to cost the Poultry Industry between 200-1,000M USD per year.

    With consumers taking to social media to share their experiences, brand protection is more important than ever. Automate and Control LTD have the most advanced solution on the market to ensure your consumers don’t suffer a poor quality experience.

    “Wooden breast” describes quality problems caused by abnormal muscles in a small portion of chicken. This condition makes the chicken breasts hard to the touch, and the colour is usually light and the texture is poor. Wooden breast will not bring any health or food safety hazards to people, and the welfare of the chicken itself will not be negatively affected.

    What causes the “woody breast”?
    Do larger, faster raised chickens cause “woody breasts”?

    The cause of the “woody breast” is not yet clear, and researchers are working to determine the cause and possible solutions. The poultry industry will invest more than a quarter of a million dollars in four independent research projects of independent universities and the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, while also collaborating with geneticists, veterinarians, and animal scientists to gain insight into this kind of muscle disease and remedy it.

    Is “Wooden Brest” a threat to my health? Is this common?

    No, chicken with “woody/wooden breast” will not pose a threat to consumers’ health. The concern about “woody breasts” is the quality (texture and appearance) of the meat, not the health or nutritional content of the meat. All chicken companies check these quality problems in their processing plants. This situation is sporadic and only affects a small part of the poultry.

    How do chicken producers currently deal with “woody-breasted chicken”?

    In addition to strict Food Safety Inspection equipment such as X-rays and metal detectors the chicken companies also have processing plant employees who inspect each piece of breast meat in the factory. And if any quality issues such as “wooden breasts” are found, meat is usually transferred for use elsewhere.

    The issue with manual poultry breast inspection is fatigue of the employee carrying out this process. Early in the shift the accuracy may be in the high 80% dropping off over the day to maybe around the 60% mark. With our Poultry Quality Inspection System QIS-4P you receive 100% inspection with an average of >95% accuracy.

    Using Online, High Speed, CHEMICAL COLOUR ANALYSIS, not only does our system inspect for Woody Breast it can also inspect for other contaminants not wanted in a ready to cook ready or fast food product, such as small fragments of bone, fat, skin, blood spots all that may impair the final product when consumed by your customers.

    Severe woody breast automatic inspection

    QIS-4P meat and poultry inspection systems from Automate and Control LTD


    Wooden Breast Poultry Inspection System

    For more information on Muscle Abnormalities in Broiler Breast Meat visit.

    https://www.kosfaj.org/archive/view_article?pid=kosfa-38-5-835

    For more information on automated poultry inspection systems, contact

    Automate and Control LTD – sales@automateandcontrol.co.uk

  • COVID-19 Hitting Reset on the Fast Food and Ready to Eat Sector of the Poultry Industry

    COVID-19 Hitting Reset on the Fast Food and Ready to Eat Sector of the Poultry Industry

    Labour reducing automation has always been one of the main ROI’s for implementation, until now! Our customers have been faced with the fact their food production plants could come to an immediate halt threatening their very livelihoods by a minuscule virus, that has threatened the whole worlds food security programs.

    Currently to date there are food safety quality control systems such as metal detectors and x-rays we rely on as part of the everyday protection of the food we consume. These systems protect us from glass, metal and other foreign materials that could cause a risk to our health. The next step is brand protection, to ensure the products arrives to the customer as we intend it to. Historically a lot of this quality inspection is carried out by manual intervention and human visual inspection. Flawed in many ways as fatigue reduces the accuracy over time, plus that concerning factor of human contact. Other quality impacting factors such as freshness, bacterial growth and non-visible chemical changes in products are not visible to the human eye, so high speed non-contact systems are being developed to ensure what we eat is safe and to the same exceptional quality we expect every time from the brands we trust.

    The pre-prepared / ready to cook and fast food sector of the poultry industry, takes chicken from the farm to the bun almost without any human contact. High speed automation ensures we have nutritious safe food at a price the consumer can easily afford. But with the reduction in human intervention sometimes quality can suffer with small non-conformances making it to the plate such as small bone fragments, blood spots, woody breast meat, fat, skin and other foreign matter. Automate and Control LTD have developed a system to remove these non-conformances to ensure brand protection, one of the more complex non-conformances Woody Breast has been the most challenging.  

    The muscle syndrome woody / wooded breast impairs quality of chicken fillets and is a challenge to the modern poultry meat industry. The need for online detection of affected fillets for automatic quality sorting in process, is one that our customers in the poultry industry have brought to our attention.

    Tests carried out using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and crude chemical composition could estimate protein in the fillets with an extremely accuracy. This shows that there was a larger share of free water in Woody Breast fillets.

    Our non-contact QIS-4P inspection system can successfully discriminate between Woody Breast and normal fillets by measuring both protein content and degree of water binding in the muscle, both established markers for Woody Breast.

    Our system QIS-4P inspection includes the detection of small bone fragments, blood spots, fat, skin and other foreign matter, the chicken fillets with woody breast that are still fit for human consumption can also grade on severity of Woody Breast, so the meat can be reclassified for final use ensuring the best use for your produce maintaining profit margins.

    For more information contact Automate and Control LTD –  sales@automateandcontrol.co.uk

    QIS-4P meat and poultry inspection systems


    Wooden Breast Poultry Inspection System

  • Eliminate Machine Crashes

    What happens next???

    Yes, you guessed it, downtime, waste, machine jams, possible product contamination, brand damage and more.

    We all have pinch points in our production lines, especially when working with natural packaging materials that sometimes don’t conform to the tight specifications our ever-developing automation systems require. What if the very millisecond things start to go wrong, you could automatically stop your line, or automatically reject the issue maintaining your high OEE’s?

    Automate and Control LTD now produce a plug in and play integrated vision system (IVS) especially designed for simple vision inspection solutions. If you take the video example below, the very second the bottle is out of position our IVS can stop your production line, or be linked to an automatic product reject system. And that’s only one feature this system can do, it can detect the wrong colour cap or label, detect damaged components on you line, detect misalignment of a label and check product, packaging dimensions.

    To get e quick quote and advise on your application send us a video via wetransfer, or email if its under 5mb, to sales@automateandcontrol.co.uk.

    For more application information visit – https://www.automateandcontrol.com/ai-vision-systems-artificial-intelligence/

    Eliminate Machine Crashes and Jams

  • Using Industrial Vision to Reject Burnt Food on a Production Line

    Using Industrial Vision Systems to Reject Burnt and Non-compliant Food on a Production Line

    Automate and Control LTD offer bespoke quality control vision inspection systems, using advanced camera, lighting and machine learning technologies, for 100% inspection and rejection of food non-compliance during the processing and cooking process. 

    Ice cream wafer cone inspection

    During the cooking process small particles of the liquid mix can get stuck to the cooking mold causing them to burn and drop off into good product. Our system easily integrates into existing lines ensuring no product with burnt particles reach the end user spoiling their experience of your products.

    Ice cream wafer cup industrial vision system good
    Ice cream wafer cup industrial vision system good
    Ice cream wafer cup industrial vision system good burnd particle detection large
    Ice cream wafer cup industrial vision system good burnt particle detection large
    Ice cream wafer cup industrial vision system good 2mm particle detection
    Ice ream wafer cup industrial vision system 2mm burnt particle detection

  • Using vision systems for food quality control

    Using vision systems to automate quality control

    Over the past 10 years the use of vision systems has been quite basic, and human inspection for complex food inspection has been heavily relied upon. Statistics show at best human inspection of high volume manual inspection is about 87% effective, rapidly degrading over time from many factors such as environment, fatigue, training and time of day to name a few.

    With the development of multi-spectral advanced vision systems encompassing always advancing software and Machine Leaning 100% inspection with 100% effectiveness can almost be guaranteed, avoiding brand damage through customer complaints, or worse lost of a customer and product recalls.

    At Automate and Control LTD we offer advanced vision systems tailored to suit your often very complex requirements. It all starts with your product, sometimes the vision system is the easy part of the project, the manual handling of your product can be the challenging part ensuring we have 360 degree inspection can sometimes be tricky. Here are some applications vision systems have been applied. We have an ever growing list so don’t be shy get in touch to start discussing your application, no matter how weird and wonderful it is. Contact us now.

    Burnt Toast Production Line vision system