Who doesn’t know the familiar “Chratli”? These stackable plastic crates, used by Coop, Migros and other retailers, are ubiquitous in the food industry. Every day, they are used to transport goods, returned, cleaned and reused.
But how can a machine automatically determine whether a crate is truly clean and undamaged? For us humans, a quick glance is usually enough. For a machine, the task is far more challenging, as dirt and damage can take many different forms.
For a major food manufacturer, aerne engineering has developed an AI-based image processing solution that identifies whether a crate is clean, contaminated or damaged, ensuring that unsuitable crates are automatically removed from the process.
In the specialist article published by Swiss Plastics Expo 2026, Marco Tobler, Sales Engineer at aerne engineering, explains why conventional image processing reaches its limits when tackling this challenge, how the AI was trained and what benefits the _ae VISION solution delivers in day-to-day operation.
