Scorpion found in cheese factory

One of the UK's leading manufacturers of Stilton cheese is the Long Clawson Dairy, based near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Established in 1911, the business is of a significant size and relies on the supply of quality milk from no less than 43 local farms. Recently it also relied on Scorpion Vision to provide the expertise and products for a 3D robot vision system to sort out a labelling problem on its production line.

Working in conjunction with Stelram Engineering, providers of robot and automation systems to many industries including the food and beverage sector, Scorpion's solution for the installation at the cheese manufacturing plant not only overcame the engineering obstacles: it also won the company the award for 'Innovative Machine Vision Solution' at the PPMA Awards in 2019.

The 3D Robot Vision system that Scorpion provided in conjunction with Stelram Engineering's solution solved this challenge at the Clawson's factory: the odd shaped cheese portions are difficult to label automatically, and the cheesemaker was using a mechanical labelling system to apply labels to cheese wedges. However, the fact that no two pieces of cheese are exactly the same size proved to be a headache for a fixed mechanical system, so Scorpion designed a vision system that created a mathematical 3D model of each piece of cheese as it travelled under their cameras along a conveyor belt. A well matured approach one might say.

Taking just a few microseconds to view, process and transmit the size and positioning data to the labelling machine, the new system is said to be saving Long Clawson Dairy a substantial sum of money now, given that the previous labelling method had an 80% rework rate because of inaccurate placement on the packaging.