IoT based fruit quality measurement system

Abstract

In today's world, food processing industries are immense part of human livelihood be it directly or indirectly. Human population consume enormous amount of foods that are sold in packaged form manufactured in several food processing industries around the globe. Packaged fruit products such as juice, jam, jelly, tomato ketchup, fruit cakes etc. are the most popular examples of such intake. But, when quality of fruit comes into the scene, maximum fruit processing industries do still depend on direct human intervention. Especially, in the selection process of good quality fruits from a dynamic fruit chain. This method is obviously an error prone task in nature. Henceforth, influenced to abolish this practice, a study is conducted on how automated quality checking (i.e. ripening percentage) can be done. To counter this problem, a simple, easy to design and portable solution based on Internet of Things is presented in this paper. This study has been carried out using a set of Apples (Malus Domestica) to proof of this concept. The preselected apples are numbered per their ripening (i.e. measure of good taste and quality). Later, an Arduino based microcontroller board performs analog read operation, based on which a pre-calibrated indexing table is compared to disseminated the ripening index. This information is instantaneously sent over the Internet of Things based cloud platform for storage, and real-time knowledge processing. This way, this successful experiment can further be modified and optimized to be practically useful in fruit processing industry.