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popsci_2013 02352.txt

#How It Works: The Robotic Chicken Butcherif you've ever wondered how boneless chicken parts end up that way take a peek inside one of the 4000 or so poultry processing plants in the U s. Workers man massive assembly lines to scald pluck gut slice and wrap an estimated nine billion birds annually. Unsurprisingly work in poultry plants is dirty and dangerous. The job of chicken deboner (who cuts through the shoulder joint to separate the wing from the body) is particularly brutal since it requires performing repetitive motions with a knife for hours on end in a room the temperature of a refrigerator. If ever there was a job for a robot this is it. But teaching a machine to carve poultry is difficult. No two chickens are the same and each cut must be perfect. If a robot splinters a bone it contaminates the meat. If it leaves too much flesh behind it costs its owner money. Later this year a team from the Geor gia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta will put the finishing touches on an autonomous robotic chicken butcher. The Intelligent Deboning System a one-armed knife-wielding automaton has the brains and dexterity to debone a bird in four seconds flat on par with a human butcher. 1) Queue Gutted whole chickens sit on metal cones as they travel along a conveyor belt just as they would in a conventional poultry factory. 2) Assess Each chicken passes through a kind of photo booth. Inside two pairs of stereo cameras scan the bird one pair per side. A computer instantly renders the images into a 3-D map of the bird. It also identifies useful markers such as the humerus and the coracoid bones. 3) Calculate (Not shown in illustration) In a production model that the Georgia Tech researchers plan to build two robotic arms work on opposite sides of the conveyor belt one arm for each side of the bird. Equipped with a 3-D map of the incoming chicken the robots calculate a cutting trajectory accurate to within three millimeters. Fortunately the body proportions of a chicken adhere to quantifiable standards. So by calculating the dimensions of one body region the machines can deduce the dimensions of all the other body parts. 4) Slice To remove the wings from the breast meat the robotic arms slice into the chicken with a knife at the collarbone move toward the shoulder cut through the shoulder joint and continue down the bird's backside along the shoulder blade all in two seconds. 5) Repeat Nine billion times a year. Knife Arm The business end of the robot is an industrial arm similar to those used to weld and paint car parts. The prototype features six degrees of freedom (one less than a human arm) to make cuts as fluid and graceful as possible. Force Feedback A force-torque sensor on the tip of the knife imparts sensitivity to the blade. Because the arm can sense resistance it can move the blade along the surface of the bone without slicing through it and can discern between meat tendons and ligaments. The big challenge is teaching the robot to adjust its behavior in real time to account for all the variation in different birds says Ai-Ping Hu senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Force feedback is key to accomplishing this. Dull blade? The sensor knows that too and signals the robot to sharpen it. Brain (Not shown in illustration) To help the robot calculate the cutting path algorithms compare 3-D maps of each chicken to a database of dozens of different body types. The machine also learns on the fly and gets smarter with each new chicken it carves. Calculations per Second to Render a Map of the Bird: 1000seconds it Takes to Calculate a Cut: 0. 5seconds to Debone an Individual Bird: 2ã¢Â#ÂESTIMATED Cost of Each Robot Butcher: $350000pounds of Chicken Consumed Per capita in the U s. Each year: 84see the rest of the articles from our 2013 How It Works section here and see all of our April issue here. It's all a matter of time until chicken and robot will merge to become one! Brahahahaaaa HA HA! Vegetables feel pain. But they don't have tiny little faces to show us the horror that they experience before we kill them. And many vegetarians maul their freshly plucked victims-with out slicing them up and cooking them. Let the plant holocaust live on!!The Japanese are already selling them since 2011: http://www. youtube. com/watch? v=Urjfwrv iawi believe a few factories already have had them. popsci it back in 2010: Video: Wielding Sharp Knife Robot Debones 500 Hams Per Hour (Robot of the Week) What could possibly go wrong? By Julie Beck Posted 12.06.2010 at 2: 53 pm http://www. youtube. com/watch? v=Urvfcqghslqkuka is doing this with pigs already http://www. kuka-robotics. com/canada/en/solutions/solutions search/L r280 050528 westfleisch. htman overhead conveyor keeps the carcasses moving continuously through the slaughtering line at a speed of 170 millimeters per second. As the robots have to track this motion they are synchronized with the conveyor by means of the conveyor software. Parallel to this the laser measuring system which works in three dimensions generates precise data of the entire surface of the carcasses. This is necessary as the pigs are all of different weights and sizes and have differing anatomical features. The calculated coordinates are sent to the robot controller by the PC evaluation software which generates individual cutting data for each carcass. The controller then calculates the corresponding robot trajectories. The first robot in the line a KR 30 equipped with a double shackle then cuts off the pigs front feet at a defined position. The second KR 30 suspended from the ceiling uses a special cutting tool to remove the rectum. Following a renewed 3d laser measurement a KR 60 also installed in the inverted position breaks the pig s pelvic bone with a cutting tool resembling a cleaver and scores the abdominal wall. The second KR 60 opens the belly and chest of the carcass with a circular cutter. The sternum is cut completely and precisely through the middle. before companies get excited please do note that it should be corrected as 9 MILLION times a year that too at no downtime 365 days a year 24 hrs a day60 seconds a minute. 3600 second per hr*24 hrs*365 days is 31536000 at 4 seconds per cut it is 7884000 courtesy indian businessman gee b

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