Automation of Bird Front Half Deboning Procedure: Design and Analysis

Bio -material cutting, such as meat deboning, is one of the most common operations in the food processing industry. It is also the largest employer of people in the United States. These tasks are currently manual processes with only limited use of fixed automation. The main difficulty in this task is the natural variability of the product's size and individual anatomy. The industry is looking to robotics to help solve these problems. This research has focused on automating the cutting of chicken front halves to obtain high quality breast meat. In order to specify the cutting locations and cutting trajectories on chicken front halves, in this paper, the anatomy structure of the chicken shoulder joint was studied first. Then a 2-DOF cutting mechanism was proposed. Through the formulation of the kinematics and dynamics of the mechanism, the cutting trajectory was simulated. Pneumatic actuators with position feedback sensors were selected as the driven system. To verify whether the pneumatic driving system could satisfy the trajectory following requirements (speed and response time), experiments were carried out. The results show that the pneumatics driven system can marginally follow the desired trajectory with enough speed for the adaptation motion. The device will be built and tested in our future research.