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A $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative 3.0 and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help University of Arkansas researchers design robotics for use in poultry processing plants.
The four-year project, led by Dongyi Wang, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering, aims to develop a robotic system that can hang raw chicken as human workers do to meet the long-term needs of the poultry industry.
Wang conducts research for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the UA System Division of Agriculture. He also has a research appointment with the Food Science Department and a teaching appointment with the UA College of Engineering.
“We are trying to explore the opportunities and to see how automation can help the agriculture industry and the food industry,” Wang said in a news release.
Wang said that many steps on the chicken processing line are already automated, including slaughtering and evisceration. But rehanging the raw chicken is a major step that relies on human work. Workers on the processing line hang the birds on conveyor lines that continue to the deboning, wing-cutting and packing steps.
To create the automation system, the researchers aim to customize tactile sensory grippers and develop a high-resolution and high-speed 3D imaging system, creating robotic arms and hands. Researchers will test the robotics in the experiment station’s pilot chicken processing plant, the university said.
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