Crayfish sorting slide - GIF

[nova_robotics]

I'm curious of how that works. Is it sorting by size or weight? How does it trigger, I wonder?

I would wager it's weighing them, attempting to get to a certain sale weight in each bucket.

I have a tiny little bit of experience with this. Years ago I worked for a guy who was part of a team that designed something similar for sorting lobster into styrofoam bins. We had a lengthy conversation about it. Turns out it's way more difficult than it seems. So there's probably a weigh scale just out of frame under one of those upstream conveyor belts. That tells the computer what the weight of each crayfish is. Now the computer's job is to try to add up weight to get to whatever sale weight each bin is. If they're selling 5 lbs containers to stores, then that's what the computer tries to achieve using varying weights of crayfish. It adds smaller and bigger crayfish to get to each bucket to the ideal weight. Sounds easy, but it turns out this is a really difficult problem. The error tends to stack up and you're left with oddball crayfish that don't fit anywhere. An I Love Lucy chocolate factory situation.