DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF A NEW TYPE OF SORTING, EVISCERATION, AND CLEANING EQUIPMENT FOR SEA CUCUMBER

In sea cucumber production lines, manual sorting, de-sanding, and organ removing operations still predominate, severely limiting production efficiency and posing sig-nificant risks to product consistency and hygiene. This paper introduces a novel piece of equipment for sea cucumber sorting, de-sanding, organ removing, and washing. Em-ploying an innovative process of "automatic sand mouth removal + high-pressure water jet washing + hook-assisted organ removal," the equipment adapts well to sea cucum-bers of various sizes and conditions, offering high versatility and facilitating an auto-mated, efficient, and standardized processing workflow. Moreover, due to the high sensitivity to the sea cucumber's external shape and posture and the complexity of the background caused by residues during the de-sanding and organ removing process, which complicates the recognition of the sea cucumber's sand mouth, this study pro-poses a sand mouth recognition algorithm for complex backgrounds. Utilizing tiered recognition technology, the algorithm precisely locates the sea cucumber's sand mouth following the extraction of its position through artificial intelligence, significantly en-hancing the success rate of recognition. Experimental results indicate that the prototype of this equipment increases the speed of de-sanding and organ removing by 107.8% compared to existing integrated sea cucumber washing and cutting equipment. The cleaning effectiveness is excellent, with a high sea cucumber cleaning acceptance rate of 91%, which is an increase of 6.125% over manual sorting, de-sanding, and organ re-moving methods, and the work efficiency has increased more than ninefold, achieving the anticipated outcomes.