back to article Who needs flying cars when we can robotically sort Skittles?

One of life's most vexing chores has finally been roboticized: sorting those delectable candy pellets, Skittles, by color. If you insist to The Reg that you've never separated a bag of Skittles – or, for that matter, their chocolaty analog, M&M's – into piles segregated by their purple, green, orange, red, and yellow hues, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sorted for e's and whiz.

  2. M Gale

    Nice trick. Hardly groundbreaking, I've worked in places where the colour of labels is scanned by dedicated colour-detection "cameras". Put in quotes because the only output from these devices is not an image but a value for "is what is in front of me the correct preprogrammed colour value(s)?"

    For a one-geek-and-some-tools trick though, it's pretty awesome. A challenge to others to see if they can do it better, perhaps!

  3. Steven Roper
    Go

    He's got some work to do to beat human fingers though

    My 6-year-old nephew can sort Skittles and Smarties a damn sight faster than that machine does it!

    1. Thorne

      Re: He's got some work to do to beat human fingers though

      Yeah but the machine won't eat them while doing it

      1. Bob H
        Terminator

        Re: He's got some work to do to beat human fingers though

        "Yeah but the machine won't eat them while doing it"

        Are you sure? #rotm

  4. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    I'm not interested, until...

    it can plough through a box of choccies and incinerate all the coffee flavoured ones.

    1. FartingHippo
      Stop

      Re: I'm not interested, until...

      No, no, no, no, no. Just send them to me!

  5. AceRimmer
    Stop

    Slow and boring

    Have a look at the flexipicker robots on yuotube

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9oeOYMRvuQ

  6. Robert Helpmann??
    Childcatcher

    What's in a meme?

    I know there is no one accepted definition as to what constitutes a robot, but what springs to mind is something that mimics existing biological creatures in order to get things done. For example, if it flies, it ought to fly something like a bird (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuD1WKHsggs) and if it runs, it ought to run on legs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chPanW0QWhA).

    Not to take away from the sorter, which was quite clever, but if I had my druthers, I would rather see an octobot with awesome tentacular sorting action (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTeUZTk5J2c).

  7. AceRimmer
    Terminator

    This one is much more fun

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ccr1smU4g

    It even does the hard work of randomising the pills in the first place

    1. Bob H
      Stop

      Re: This one is much more fun

      "This video does not exist"

      1. AceRimmer
        FAIL

        Re: This one is much more fun

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ccr1smU4gY

        copy and paste fail

  8. Graham Marsden
    Alert

    "If you insist to The Reg...

    "...that you've never separated a bag of Skittles – or, for that matter, their chocolaty analog, M&M's – into piles segregated by their purple, green, orange, red, and yellow hues, well, we simply won't believe you."

    Well I haven't, mostly because they don't taste as nice as Smarties! (Which I may have sorted into colours, but that's my business...)

  9. Random Yayhoo
    Coat

    Does no one care...

    ...that Skittles are to M&Ms like chicken s**t to chicken salad?

    Mine's the one with rainbow-coloured chocolate stains.

  10. James 100

    I recall a similar student project at York University back in 1997, sorting marbles by colour - just two variants there though, and a great deal faster (flipping a dividing gate between two positions with an electromagnet) - sorting the marbles as they rolled down a chute as a "stream", rather than stopping to examine each one before going to the next. Easily adaptable to this of course: split 3 colours one way, the rest the other, then adjust the settings and re-sort those two batches.

    Still, quite a neat little project; he could probably make it 2-3 times faster just by keeping the feeder rotating and sampling the moment the next morsel passes the lens, if he wanted.

  11. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    Surely if we adapt the machine for M&Ms...

    ... we'd still be able to use it to sort Skittles, so it wouldn't be a mere M&MSM, as the article suggests. Indeed, let's hope that it could handle Smarties as well, for a full-on S&S&M&MSM.

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