The work aims to develop an industrial robot cigarette sorting system platform based on vision to sort various kinds of cigarettes efficiently. The double process execution system of LABVIEW image acquisition and processing was adopted. The image template matching algorithm of the second development was conducted based on LABVIEW. The data obtained from the template matching algorithm can be compared to the database of industrial robots to realize the recognition and sorting of cigarettes, which expanded the application scope of robots. Four kinds of cigarettes were randomly placed for sorting, the recognition time was within 100 ms, and the recognition accuracy was 100%, the cigarette sorting speed can be adjusted according to the conveyor belt setting of 0-4 m/s. The practice shows that the software and hardware design of the system is correct, the cigarette identification is accurate, and the cigarette sorting efficiency is high.