\u201cThe American market\u2019s about seven times the size of New Zealand for apples only. Washington\u2019s the Hawke\u2019s Bay equivalent of New Zealand and grows about two-thirds of the fruit.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ve gone and focused on that area … the demand at this stage is greater than our manufacturing capability,\u201d Combs said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a far cry from where it all began more than 30 years ago when Combs\u2019 grandad was collecting kerbside recycling to process and export for his business, All Brite Industries.<\/p>\n
The Comb family bought Hawk Packaging and began turning the recycling into the cardboard trays that sit between layers of fruit when it is boxed up in packhouses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had customers start coming to us and say, \u2018hey, look, you supply your trays in bundles of 175 trays, and we\u2019ve just got someone essentially standing there grabbing a tray and putting it onto a conveyor belt, is there some way that you can automate that for us\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n
The first machine they designed was a \u201cTray Denester\u201d, which separates a bundle of apple trays, then they created a \u201cTray Inserter\u201d. But it\u2019s the third product that\u2019s been the most popular: the Robotic Apple Packer.<\/p>\n
With 15 AI cameras working simultaneously, the robot inspects the fruit for any flaws and places it into cardboard trays according to its colour and quality.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably where most of the IP sits is how we handle the fruit… it presents stem and calyx to the cameras so the guys upstairs can take photos and do the defects.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is quite a special piece of development, and is a big part of what makes the machine so attractive,\u201d Combs said.<\/p>\n
The entire process is done on site in Hawke\u2019s Bay.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a full design team in-house. We\u2019ve got fabrication in-house, and electricals in-house.<\/p>\n
\u201cA big philosophy of ours is just keeping everything here. We didn\u2019t want to have to send stuff overseas, and we wanted our design team and our fabrication team and our assembly team in the same room,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And while the robots are replacing some packhouse workers, Combs said for many employers it\u2019s solved a labour shortage problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn New Zealand it was a real problem for our customers to even find that labour in the first place, so it\u2019s there to complement their existing workforces,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Alan McDonald, from the Employers and Manufacturers Association agreed. He said while there\u2019s been an increase in workplaces using AI and robots, it hadn\u2019t resulted in fewer jobs overall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know there\u2019s a lot of concern about AI replacing people, but what we\u2019ve seen in the past is that\u2019s not the case \u2013 there\u2019s displacement, re-training and different skills required, but more or less the same numbers are retained in the workplace.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe common thing that we\u2019re hearing is that the issue with AI is it still needs human oversight and human input to work effectively in the workplace \u2013 so it\u2019s about how do we adjust those tasks, how do we re-train our people,\u201d McDonald said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the topic of a conference being held in Auckland on Tuesday night, called \u201cWorkforce 2030\u2033, helping employers prepare for the increased use of AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a reordering as people get used to working with these new tools and AI is just a tool… so how does that redesign the task or the job to accommodate both?,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Seven years ago Hawk Technology had just two research design and development staff. That has grown to a team of more than 50 workers to keep up with the growing demand for robotics.<\/p>\n
Senior mechatronics engineer Ben Kloosterman has been with the company several years and is working on the Gen 5 Apple Packer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m currently writing machine codes, that\u2019s the software that runs on the machine and drives the packing behaviour of that machine, which involves everything from moving motors, vision processors from the cameras, inference to the AI models that we create and develop here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s excited about where technology is headed.<\/p>\n
\u201cPreviously with industrial automation it was always a bit frustrating \u2019cause the technology was like 20 years behind, so being free to learn and grow in that cutting edge technology is really really cool,\u201d Kloosterman said.<\/p>\n
The next challenge Hawk Technology is keen to tackle is robotics for the stone fruit industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cStone fruit is on the horizon… for us, it\u2019s an obvious kind of next cab off the ranks. We\u2019ll be looking into that over the next year or so,\u201d Combs said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe American market\u2019s about seven times the size of New Zealand for apples only. Washington\u2019s the Hawke\u2019s Bay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,4193,351,363,364,1975,1561,12974,4194,4190,4189,2082,1976,2454,39608,111,139,69,13810,145,3040],"class_list":["post-548914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alexa","tag-apple","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-at","tag-bay","tag-change","tag-cook","tag-demand","tag-driving","tag-for","tag-hawkes","tag-industry","tag-manufacturer","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-robotics","tag-technology","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}