Whole head infeed handling, orienting and core removal

At the front of the fresh-cut line, whole heads of iceberg, romaine, butter lettuce and cabbage arrive from field-cooling stations and must be individually picked, oriented and presented to a coring/trimming station before they are cut, washed and dried. Each head is a deformable, fragile, variable-geometry object with a dense central core and a slippery, often wet outer surface; size and shape vary head-to-head and the leaves bruise or tear under excess force. The task involves grasping a head without crushing the leaf structure, locating the hidden dense core, and removing the butt/core and damaged outer leaves while preserving usable product. It is hard for a robot because vision alone cannot judge how much the head will deform under grip, where the core's resistance begins, or how slip develops on a wet surface, and a force-blind grasp either drops the head or destroys leaves. Fresh Express is the largest user of iceberg, romaine and specialty lettuces in the nation and produces on the order of 40 million pounds of salad per month, so even this single upstream task represents very high piece volume and significant manual labor. We identified this through our own research; we have not confirmed the specifics with the customer directly. This page is our researched read — a starting point for that conversation.