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Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)
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ItemKinematics and Verification of a Deboning Device(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-08) Zhou, Debao ; Daley, Wayne ; McMurray, GaryPoultry 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.
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ItemIntelligent Cutting of the Bird Shoulder Joint(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009) Hu, Ai-Ping ; Grullon, Sergio ; Zhou, Debao ; Holmes, Jonathan ; Holcombe, Wiley ; Daley, Wayne ; McMurray, GaryDeboning operations are one of the largest users of on-line labor in today’s poultry plants. Efforts have been made over the years to automate this function, but to date have achieved only limited success. The main difficulty in this task is its unstructured nature due to the natural variability in the sizes of birds and their deformable bodies. To increase product safety and quality, the industry is looking to robotics to help solve these problems. This research has focused on developing a new method of automating the deboning of bird front halves. If this task can be automated, the technology would naturally be extended to other cuts and trimming operations in poultry and red meat. To accomplish this goal, the project team has been working for the past four years on the development of a sensor-based intelligent cutting system. This work is based on the development of a model for the cutting of bio-materials that can be extended to the cutting of meat, tendon, ligaments, and bone. When this model is combined with data from the tendon prediction system, the nominal cutting trajectory can be established and adjusted based on the cutting model in conjunction with knowledge of the bird's anatomy. The value in accomplishing this work would be to not only reduce labor costs but also to increase the yield of breast meat and reduce/eliminate bone chips. It is estimated that an increase in yield of a single percentage point could represent several millions of dollars of additional revenue for each and every plant. Current attempts at automation of the shoulder cut impose several percentage points of yield loss in return for lower labor costs. In the manual process, while generally providing a higher yield of breast meat, the quality of the product varies dramatically based on the skill of the worker, and the labor costs are significantly higher. It is the goal of this work to develop a system that eliminates labor and consistently provides a yield similar to the best manual worker. The overall vision for this project requires the development of various technology components that will be unified into a single operational system. This includes a system to identify the initial cutting point, a system to specify the nominal cutting trajectory based on the size of that specific bird, a model to predict the location of the joint and shoulder tendons given the position/orientation of the wing tip, a mathematical model of the cutting process that allows the control system to interpret force/torque data and make intelligent motion commands to avoid cutting through the bone, and a robotic platform capable of executing these commands in real-time.
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ItemAutomation of the Bird Shoulder Joint Deboning(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-09) Zhou, Debao ; Holmes, Jonathan ; Holcombe, Wiley ; McMurray, GaryPoultry 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.
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ItemAutomation of Bird Front Half Deboning Procedure: Design and Analysis(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-06) Zhou, Debao ; Holmes, Jonathan ; Holcombe, Wiley ; Lee, Kok-Meng ; McMurray, GaryBio -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.