(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.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-06)
Zhou, Debao; Holmes, Jonathan; Holcombe, Wiley; Lee, Kok-Meng; McMurray, Gary
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.