“Microcontrollers and Sensors in Post-harvest Application of Agricultural Commodity’s Sorting/ Grading and Storage”.

Abstract

Now days, there is general trend of industrial automation which is nothing but the process of handling different industrial processes automatically with the help of various machines such as computers and robots i.e. with the help of microcontrollers and sensors. This approach increases efficiency, productivity and decreases the human efforts and labour cost. Food industry is also incorporating this same approach of industrial automation in processing techniques to reduce production time and labour cost for enhancing quality of the produce and profit. There are many processing techniques such as sorting, grading, screening, dehulling and storage which required to be done in food industry for obtaining uniformity in products for further processing. Automatic sorting mechanism is a basic need in agricultural fields or in food industries. Sorting of any raw material can be depend on color, size, shape and weight of the commodity. In case of storage of the commodity, it is very difficult to monitor and control the storage parameters by manually, so with the interventions of sensors, actuators and microcontrollers one can easily control the real time, storage conditions automatically with better precision and accuracy.