Smart avos revolutionising fruit transport in South Africa
The civil engineering department of the University of Pretoria is using “smart fruit” to significantly improve the transportation of fresh produce in South Africa and across the world.
The project started after André Broekman, a PhD student, designed a similar sensor to measure how ballast moves under train tracks.
He realised that there were other applications for this technology, including how fruit moves from a tree to the market.
Professor Wynand Steyn, head of the civil engineering department and chair of engineering at the university, said this is an excellent example of technologies developed during academic research leading to valuable real-world applications.
The smart fruit — SmAvo and Smato (smart-avo and smart-tomato) — are data logging devices that measure the movements of artificial fruit during the harvesting and transportation process.
By measuring movements, they can detect where damage is done to fruit before they get to market.
Optimisation in the transportation of fresh produce improve the quality of products and reduce losses. This, in turn, reduces prices to consumers and improves profits to farmers.
The artificial fruits use low-cost commercially available hardware, and the plans are made freely available to encourage farmers to use the technology.
The shells are 3D-printed, using materials that emulate the hardness and flexibility of different fruit, like avocados or tomatoes.
For example, the smart tomato uses softer and more flexible thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) compared to the harder PLA shell of the avocado.
This technology has already been used to optimise processes on commercial farms in South Africa.
It helps to improve the picking of fruit, washing and processing, transport on the road network, and even international transport on ships for the export market.
The full paper with more details around the design of the sensors and the test results is freely available on HardwareX.
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