ARE you tired of buying fruits that look good in the shop, only to find them tasteless, not as ripe as you expected or rotten inside? And what are the chances of buying good fruits as a gift for someone or to even be consumed.
It can be a little difficult to find the "perfect fruit". All fruits are not created equal so how would you know which one is the tastiest and of the highest quality?
Imagine being in a shop and surround by piles of green apples, pears, grapes, cherries, grapefruit, avocados and more and the supermarket makes no distinction between bruised and overripe fruit, under-ripe fruit and the imperfect.
They have travelled for kilometres, they could be at their prime, or way past it. Many would also hope, to make things easier for consumers purchasing fruits at shops, to have the quality of these fruits checked first before hitting the shelves.
Now thanks to researchers from Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), who have invented a machine which not only checks the quality of the fruits on the outer part but also check their inner quality.
Ammar Zakaria and Fathinul Syahir Ahmad Saad, both PhD students, said the idea to invent the product came after their own experience on how difficult it was to find good quality fruits.
They decided to work on an invention to help the Agricultural Department and and the Federal Agriculture Marketing Authority (Fama) to check on the quality of fruits by using a machine called bio-inspired fruit sorting (BIFS) -- one that adapts to human perception concept and built with four formalities.
It uses infrared sensor to detect how sweet the fruit is and the accurate timing to eat a fruit. It also detects the ripeness of a fruit and its maturity. This can be detected through heat sensor. It also detects if the fruit is spoilt or if there are worms. Then we have the e-nose (electronic nose), a device intended to detect odours or flavours, similarly like a human nose.
The charge couple device camera (CCDC) serves as "eyes" and detects the shape, weight and colour of the fruit and lastly, acoustics which detects the firmness of a fruit. In total, BIFS works as a mechanism that ensures the quality of the fruits coming into the market. This machine has been used on pineapples, star fruits, mangoes and ciku.