Local students' innovation set to save Idaho company $300,000 annually
From left, Dan Blanchette, Jordan Reed and James Lasso stand behind Project S.P.L.I.N.T.E.R., an automated cedar plank inspection machine they designed and built as part of their engineering capstone project, in the U of I Coeur d’Alene lab.
Three University of Idaho Coeur d’Alene/North Idaho College students have designed an automated machine that will save a local company $300,000 annually.
James Lasso, Jordan Reed and Dan Blanchette all started their education in NIC’s computer science program before transferring to U of I Coeur d’Alene’s computer science undergraduate program. Their College of Engineering capstone design is called Project S.P.L.I.N.T.E.R. — Smart Plank Inspection for Navigation for Timber Evaluation and Recognition.
“The idea of the project is there’s this company that makes salmon grilling planks, and they have a team of graders that stand around and look at the planks to make sure there’s no defects,” team lead James Lasso said. “They look for knots, rot, cracks and metal, just everything.”
The cedar grilling planks are produced at Wildwood Grilling in Ponderay. Because these planks are used in cooking, they must adhere to the highest food safety standards.
“It’s a slow process. It’s tedious. It’s hard,” Lasso said, “So, we were tasked with building a system to alleviate that and increase production speed.”
The team built an automated machine that inspects the planks and identifies any flaws. If any are found, the rejected planks are swept from the conveyor belt while the accepted planks are sent through.
“It’s going to take a picture. It’s going to run it through the model to see if it’s a bad board or not,” Reed said. “If it is and if our model has detected it, it will come through and it will kick it off.”
The software the team designed keeps track of the process, and the team chose all the parts for the construction of the machine.
“The idea is we’re using machine vision to take pictures of the planks to identify defects and alleviate that process and see if we can speed it up,” Lasso said.
Once implemented, Project S.P.L.I.N.T.E.R. will save Wildwood $300,000 a year, Dr. John Shovic, director of U of I’s Center for Intelligent Industrial Robotics, said.
The students demonstrated the machine at the Engineering Design EXPO on the University of Idaho campus in Moscow on April 25-26. Shovic said Wildwood representatives attended and got to see Project S.P.L.I.N.T.E.R. in action.
Shovic praised the collaboration between U of I, its Coeur d’Alene center and NIC that makes these projects possible.
“The partnership between U of I and NIC is exceptional,” he said.