APPLICATION OF ARMA MODELING TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF WEIGHT ESTIMATIONS IN FRUIT SORTING AND GRADING MACHINERY

J. V. Francis, J. Calpe, E. Soria, M. Martinez, A. Rosado, A.J. Serrano, J. Calleja*,M. Diazo

G.P.D.S., Departament dEnginyeria Electrbnica, Universitat de Valhcia. C/ Dr. Moliner, 50.46100 Burjassot (Valencia) - Spain E-Mail: Jose.V.Frances @uv.es (*) Dismuntel, S.A.L. Avda Pais Valencii, 155, E-46680 Algemesi (Valencia) Spain (0) Maxfrut, S.L. Avda de 10s Deportes 5, E-46600 Alzira (Valencia) Spain

ABSTRACT
Accurate weighting of pieces in different sorts of conveyor belts or articulated chains at fast speed is a key feature in many industrial processes. This paper presents a procedure to improve the performance, whether increasing speed or accuracy, of the load-cell-based weighting subsystem in a fruit sorting and grading machine to achieve an accuracy of f l gram at a speed of 20 fruits per seconds. The proposed solution includes a signal preprocessing based on a previous ARMA modeling of the weighting subsystem response plus a power line-noise removal and a simple sample averaging in the plateau. The procedure has been tested off-line using real signals acquired from a prototype machine.

In the following section, both the machine and the experimental equipment employed to acquire and process the signals will be described. In the third section the proposed procedure to estimate weight from raw signals will be discussed: the first stage includes the use of an ARMA model to reconstruct the signal, followed by a removal of the distortion of the mains harmonics and a final low-pass filtering. Most of the description will be related to the worst case; i.e. maximum speed, although conclusions are applicable to lower speeds. The procedure is validated with a series of tests on tracts obtained from real data in working conditions. Finally, some conclusions are exposed.

2. EXPERIMENTAL DISPOSAL
A real commercial fruit sorting and grading machine provided by Maxfrut S.L., Alzira (Spain), with two sorting lines has been used. This machine carries the single fruits using finger-like cups attached to a rotating chain. The acquisition hardware was a modification of an amplifier card provided by Dismuntel, S.A.L. Algemesi (Spain), based on the LTCl 100 monolithic instrumentation amplifier from Linear Technologies Corp., Milpitas (CA). Data were acquired with a DAQCard-Al16XE50 from National Instruments, Austin (TX), with a lowpass filter whose cut-off frequency is 400 Hz at a sampling frequency of IKHz. ADC resolution is 16 bits although just 14 are useful given the SNR of the analogue acquisition and amplifying circuitry. The relation between converter units and weight is approximately 1 gram = 13 converter units. The weighting module consist of a rail of a low-friction material (Teflon) that reduces the impact of cups entering the weighting area at high speeds mounted on an aluminum frame housing the load cell. The rail has a physically isolated tract where the real weighting is performed. The hereby-used load cell is a steel lOLbs from Artech lndustries Inc. (Riverside, CA) with 2.096mVN ( lOLbs [l]. 2 A synchronization signal is provided by an optical encoder as a reference for measurements and transmitted to the acquisition PC via a CAN bus. This reference was set to the point where the cups leave the weighting area. The analysis was performed off-line using MATLAB 5.2 from Mathworks Inc., Cambridge (MA) on a Pentium I1 based PCplatform [ 2 ] .

1. INTRODUCTION
In industry, applications where the weight of an object passing on a load cell must be estimated are frequent (Fig. 1). These applications often require meeting tight speed and accuracy specifications which are, in some terms contradictory. In fruit sorting and grading machinery, a usual specification is +Ig accuracy at speeds of 10 pieces per second; although, in real practice, it is seldom achieved because very simple digital processing (basically, low-order averages) is performed. Our goal is to achieve the same accuracy doubling the speed; i.e. 20 pieces/second; obviously, it requires higher signal processing complexity. Due to its industrial applicability, studies about this problem are barely published.

Weight

Load Cell

Fig. 1. Scheme of the dynamic weighting system.

L l

____,

This paper has been partially supported by the Comisi6n Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnologfa (CICYT) and the European Commission under project 1FD97-0977-C02-01

0-7803-6293-4/00/$10.0002000IEEE

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3. SYSTEM MODEL
Fruits or vegetables are lined-up and placed into the cup in a previous stage, then they are tossed at a constant speed and enter a weighting platform as smooth as possible to avoid impacts and minimize vibrations. However, when the cup enters or leaves this platform and over-ringing is observed in the signal due to the characteristics of the load cell. Figure 2 shows a typical waveform when a 15Og piece travels over the weighting platform at a speed of 20 fruits per second.

The effect of a piece entering the platform can be modeled with an step input if a long enough tract of the signal is available. As weighting platform is necessarily short, it is more convenient to consider the ringing observed when the piece leaves the platform and the following cups have been removed. Figure 3 shows a tract of the original signal obtained when the piece gets off the platform, a second-order behavior is clearly observed. The input to model such a system is then:

x(n) =

1 n<O
0 n20

3.1 ARMA Modeling.

The proposed modeling of the transfer function is based on an ARMAX model from a single input record:

A(q)y(n) B(q)x(n- 4 + C(q)e(n) =

(2)

where y(n) is the output of the system, x(n) the stimulus, e(n) the prediction error, A(q) the AR coefficients, B(4) the MA coefficients, C(q) the estimated covariance and d the delay of the model. The order of the Auto-Regressive and Moving-Average parts is set to two and ARMAX coefficients are obtained using a robust quadratic prediction error criterion based on an iterative GaussNewton algorithm has been used [3].

Fig. 2. An overshoot is observed in the original signal for a 15Og weight at maximum speed. The moment when the piece exits the weighting platform is indicated with a vertical solid line.
The system behavior can be characterized as a second-order system. Therefore, transient oscillations can be avoided if the weighting platform is made long enough to enable its convergence to a stable value; obviously, this is impossible if high rates are to be achieved, thus a removal of this effect is mandatory.

3.2 Processing stages.

According to the aforementioned model, the first stage in the processing scheme is deconvolving the original signal using the inverse of the ARMA model. This model will be obtained for every new machine in a start-off phase that will include aspects such as calibration and synchronization aspects. Ideally, this procedure should be carried out once but an occasional recalibration will avoid degradation in performance with time (consider dirt, chain elongation or ageing of electronics and sensors involved). The second stage in pre-processing pretends the removal of power line interference which is important in real industrial applications. A simple moving-average comb filter has yielded good results. As in Europe power line has a 50 Hz frequency and given our sampling rate, the proposed filter is [41:

10

15

20

25

Jo samples

35

40

45

50

55

Fig. 3. Tract of a raw signal corresponding to a 50ms time window, IOmsafter the piece gets off the weighting platform. Weighting readout offset is trimmed to yield Og when no cup lays on the weighting platform.

The final stage consists on estimating the weight of the piece. Figure 4 shows three registers obtained from different weights at maximum speed after the described pre-processing. A relatively plain plateau is observed in every case but accuracy is not enough and further processing is mandatory. Empirically, a simple average of the values in the plateau yields accurate enough estimations so the problem reduces to fixing the limits of the plateaus. The final limit is easily obtained because fruit

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sorting machinery uyes opticai e n d e r 4 t u syi!cl~ronization purposes and it is straightforward to rise a pulw to mark the moment when the cup exits the weiphting platform. The start of the plateaus I C no re ~~rtnbersorne obtarn ds i t tins 1w.n !o *mpmrally shown io depend on both speed and weight. Although a number of tcchiiiqries were coilsidered, the proposed procediire results simpie nnd efficient.

xu

-1

From real regstcrs a complex relation between weight and plateau-lengths (in samples) for a given speed is observed, but a rough simp1ificatio:i yields good results:
1.

A Look-Up Table (LUT) containing the length (in samples) of the plateaus obtained for different weights (every 20 grams) at maximum speed (20 fruits per second) is built. The pre-processed register is stored in a circular buffer. When weight-synchronization is received, the present value of the pre-processed signal is taken as a rough estimator for the weight and the LUT is accessed to see the corresponding length of the nearest weight. The number obtained is corrected according to the chain speed with a linear function. An average of the obtained length is performed using the data in the circular buffer and the outcome is converted into grams according to a linear function obtained in the calibration procedure.

2.
3.

Fig. 5. The overshoot in the original signal for a 150g weight is removed after deconvolution.

4. RESULTS
The resulting ARMA model is a second-order, zero-phase system with zero delay, so it results straightforward to equalize the system response. A model is obtained for a 30g weight at 6 fruits per second removing 5 cups after the weight and analyzing a 100 ms tract. Empirically, the application of the single resultant model has yielded good results for any weight and chain speed. To carry out tests, pattern pieces were manually placed in the working prototype at a distance of the weighting platform to avoid unwanted vibrations. For practical purposes, at least two empty cups were left between consecutive pieces. Given the slow response of the used load cells, one every two cups were removed from the chain, that causes a reduction in the effective speed of the machine measured in fruits per second. Anyway, this will be solved using faster cells that could not be received from the supplier in time for this paper.

4.

5.

This procedure is fast enough to be performed in real-time, although we could afford loosing several samples as these correspond to the descent of the plateau. Other methods for weight estimation from pre-processed registers were tested with valid results but requiring more computational burden. One of them performed a backwards moving-standard deviation analysis from the synchronization point to detect the starting point of the plateau and other one analyzed the second derivative of the signal to find out drastic changes in slope.
11 0

In order to validate the proposed procedure, tests were made at maximum speed. As some mechanical aspects of the available machine are not completely solved, the 20 fruits per second speed could not be maintained for a long time. Therefore, only 8 measurements were made for 5 different conditions: empty cup (0 grams), 30 g, 50 g, lOOg and 15Og. Figure 5 shows an original register with the 150 g piece and the result of deconvolving it according to the obtained model.
Table 1 show the results obtained at this speed together with their mean values, standard deviation and absolute maximum deviation. Note that deviation respect to the ideal value never exceeds the 1-gram tolerance.

Fig. 4. he-processed registers for an empty cup, a 50 g piece

and an 150 g piece at 20 fruits per second. Plateau limits are marked with vertical lines.

I order to increase the number of samples and assure the n performance of the procedure, chain speed was reduced to 16 fruits per second and a 150 g piece was processed 100 times. The results, shown in Figure 6 as an histogram, show a mean of 149.958 and an standard deviation of 0.52g. The number of . values exceeding the 1-gram tolerance is 4 The obtained results have been processed with a series of randomness tests [5] and have revealed to be random. We have not been able to

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fully characterize the obtained results but a Gaussian-like random distribution with the parameters previously stated fits well enough. As a fairly rough estimation, if Gaussianity is assumed, the probability to obtain weight measurements out of the f l -gram is 0.056.

a deconvolution of the original signal based on a previously estimated second-order ARMA model. The required +I -gram accuracy is achieved at the speed of 20 fruits per second. The first tests on real register show the robustness of the approach as no further adjustments were required after the initial calibration and data were acauired in different davs i n almost real conditions. The algorithm can be implemented on an stand-alone real-time system for on-line processing. Future research on the area could be directed to avoid the vibration effects that can heavily affect the measurements and have been avoided in the currently available prototype with costly and not very robust mechanical solutions.

REFERENCES
[I] Pallis, R. Sensores y acondicionadores de sefial. Marcombo. 1994.
15
Vel$ll,

0s

Fig. 6. Histogram of the values obtained after passing a 150g weight 100 times at a speed of 16 fruits per second.

[2] Ljung, L. System Identification Toolbox for use with MATLAB. The Math Works Inc. August 1995.

[3] Ljung, L. Sytem Theory: Theory for the User PrenticeHall, 1996.
[4] Proakis, J.G.; Manolakis, D.G. Introduction to Digital Signal Processing. MacMillan Pub. Co. 1988.

5. SUMMARY
A new procedure has been proposed to estimate the weight in fruit sorting and grading machinery. The core of the method is

[5] Kendall, M. Time-SeriesCharles Griffin & Co. Ltd 1976.

Table 1. Results for the test for different weights at 20 fruits per second.

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