Automation of the bird shoulder joint deboning

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.