Objective
Currently, peeling of onions in the onion industry takes place either manually (mostly performed in countries with low-wages). The current semi automatic machines have a number of shortcomings. Firstly, human operation still is required which brings additional costs to the onion industry of 17,500 Euro per annum for each required labourer. Secondly, the semi-automatic machines could only be adjusted to fixed onion, leading to quality losses and/ or unnecessary scrap. This RTD project is proposed to research, develop, build and test a machine that is able to peel an onion fully automatically. Critical aspect is whether it is possible to recognize the head and tail of the onion. The idea is to perform recognition by a camera system, which also will be used to measure the dimensions of the onion. This information is used to fine-tune the machine peeling mechanism, thus ensuring an optimal peeling operation.