As a characteristic industry in the food industry, tea is also a people's livelihood economy. Tea harvesting and processing are highly seasonal. There are many problems such as high labor intensity, low efficiency, and occupation of agricultural hours. These problems restrict the further development of the tea industry.

Therefore, relying on scientific and technological progress, strengthening the research and development of tea production machinery, realizing the mechanization of tea production, and transforming tea from extensive to intensive is not only the key to improving tea quality and realizing tea modernization, but also conducive to improving productivity, saving labor and reducing labor intensity, improving the market competitiveness of China's tea industry, and promoting rural construction, agricultural efficiency, farmers' income Promote the healthy development of the tea industry.

Especially in the current situation of structural shortage of rural labor resources, the development of tea production mechanization is not only significant, but also very urgent. "If you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools." To realize tea mechanization, you must first strengthen and improve the standardization construction of tea machinery, and change a series of problems such as uneven quality of tea machinery, low scientific and technological content, and low utilization of heat energy. This is the requirement of improving the scientific and technological content of tea processing machinery, food hygiene and safety, and establishing an intensive society.

Picking stems and removing impurities in tea processing is a time-consuming and very critical process. Picking has become the bottleneck of quality and cost control in tea refining. Due to mechanical properties and other reasons, the conventional equipment such as stepped stem picker and electrostatic stem picker has poor picking effect. If Gongfu black tea is selected by machine and static for many times, it still needs to be assisted by hand picking. The cost of manual tea picking accounts for 10% - 15% of the cost of black tea refining.

In recent years, the quality of manual picking of fresh tea leaves has declined and the mechanical picking of tea has increased, so the amount of stem picking in tea processing has increased. The industry has been looking forward to the technical breakthrough of tea picking equipment. Tea color sorter technology refers to a high-tech comprehensive technology integrating light, electricity, gas and machinery, which uses special identification lens to capture image element signals on the surface of materials, collect light transmittance signals and other component information of materials, and uses plc control and cpu processing to realize the exchange of photoelectric signals, compare and analyze the quality of materials with standard signals, and then use compressed air to remove the low-quality materials, Color separation equipment has been widely used in agriculture, food industry, industry and mining and other fields.