Food Innovation Presentation Template

1
Food Innovation Programme Research
Knowledge Transfer Prof. Terrence Perera
2
Food Manufacturing Industry

• One of the largest manufacturing sectors in the
  UK.

• Annual turnover of 64 billion.

• Employs nearly 650,000.

• Over 7,000 businesses.

3
Food Innovation Programme

• Funded by HEFCE (1.1M).
• All four faculties engaged.
• MERI secured a lion share of funding.
• Multi-disciplinary projects within MERI.
• Focused on Automation Process Improvements.

4
Interdisciplinary Working
Food Innovation Programme has brought three
research groups together within MERI

• Microsystems and Machine Vision Research Group
• Dr Amavasai
• Geometric Modelling and Pattern Recognition
  Research Group
• Prof Rodrigues, Dr Robinson
• Systems Modelling and Integration Research Group
• Dr Clegg, Mr Marsh, Dr Howarth, Dr Zhang, Prof
  Saad, Prof Perera

5
Projects

• Regional Projects
• Demonstrate the potential use of automated and
  process improvements technologies in the food
  manufacturing industry.
• Company Projects
• Deploy technologies to make a real impact in
  selected food manufacturing companies.

6
Regional Projects Automation

• WORKPACKAGE 1 Manipulation of Packaged Food
• Dr. Bala Amavasai Dr. Martin Howarth.

• demonstrate the expertise within SHU in the area
  of automated manipulation
• transfer expertise in the area of general
  manipulation to the food industry
• use tools built in-house to deliver complete
  solutions
• create interest in developing new manipulators
  for dealing with soft foods

• WORKPACKAGE 2 Fast 3D Scanning of Food Products
  for Quality Control
• Dr. Alan Robinson Prof. Marcos Rodrigues

This project will apply our proprietary 3D
technology to a food context by providing 3D
capture and visualisation from which measurements
such as volume and distances can be made, and
precise volumetric position can be provided to a
robot manipulator for pick and place operations
(linked to workpackage 1).

• WORKPACKAGE 3 Multivariate Statistical Process
  Control (MSPC) Based Condition Monitoring of
  Batch Food Processing Processes
• Dr Hongwei Zhang

This project aims to identify problems within the
batch food processing processes and apply MSPC to
those processes. The application of MSPC in the
food industry has the potential to contribute to
the improved understanding of process operations,
the close monitoring of process performance, the
early warning of process malfunctions and faults,
the reduction in energy usage, raw material usage
and environmental impact.
7
Regional Projects - Performance Improvement
Techniques

• Workpackage 4 Development of case studies and
  a simulation demonstrator
• Jim Marsh, Dr David Clegg, Professor Sameh Saad,
  Professor Terrence Perera

• The main aims of this work package are
• To produce a range of case studies to highlight
  the business benefits of
• Lean Technologies
• Computerised Planning and Scheduling
• Computer Simulation
• (b) To build a simulation model of a selected
  food manufacturing operation.

8
Workpackage 1 Demo
image data
vision software Mimas vision toolkit
robot arm Staubli RX90
PC
camera Unibrain firewire camera
object locations
objects
robot controller
controller software
control data
9
Workpackage 1 - Demo
10
Company Projects

• King Asia (Jim Marsh) Process Improvements
• Danby Foods (David Clegg) Layout design and
  process improvements
• T he Sauce Company (Terrence Perera) Process
  re-design

11
Eat, Drink, Research
Thank You!