(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-08)
Zhou, Debao; Daley, Wayne; McMurray, Gary
Poultry deboning process is one of the largest
employers in the United States and mainly involves human
workers due to the unstructured nature of the task. For the
automation of this process, a cutting device with the adaptive
capability has been developed. In this paper, we focused on the
kinematics of this device and the accuracy of the actual cutting
point location. We validated the kinematic formulation and
proofed the confidence of the accurate cutting. The applied
verification method can be generalized to be applicable to general
kinematics verification.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-09)
Zhou, Debao; Holmes, Jonathan; Holcombe, Wiley; McMurray, Gary
Poultry deboning processing is one of the largest
employers of people in the United States. It involves mainly
manual processes with only limited use of fixed automation. The
main difficulty in this task is the unstructured nature of the task
due to the natural variability of birds’ size and deformable
bodies. To increase product safety and quality, the industry is
looking to robotics to help solve these problems. This research
has focused on automating cutting of bird front halves. The
anatomic structure of the chicken shoulder joint was studied first.
Thus the cutting locations on chicken front halves were identified.
In conjunction with force control robotics, a 3-DOF device with
the capability for size adaptation and deformation compensation
was proposed and the cutting trajectory was simulated. The
results of the dynamic simulation verified that the desired
trajectory can be followed and the response time for bone
detection can be satisfied. A functional prototype of this device
has been built and is currently under evaluation.