Farmer develops cucumber sorting machine with the help of Google

Around a year ago, a former embedded systems designer from the Japanese automobile industry named Makoto Koike, started helping out at his parents cucumber farm, and was amazed by the amount of work it takes to sort cucumbers by size, shape, colour and other attributes. In Japan, each farm has its own classification standard and there's no industry standard. There are some automatic sorters on the market, but they have limitations in terms of performance and cost, and small farms don't tend to use them. Makoto first got the idea to explore machine learning for sorting cucumbers from a wildly different source - Google AlphaGo - competing with the world's top professional Go player. "When I saw the Google's AlphaGo, I realized something really serious is happening here, said Makoto. That was the trigger for me to start developing the cucumber sorter with deep learning technology."