Robotics and prawn-handling

Abstract

SUMMARY Prawns are a significant marine resource in Australia and elsewhere, but their processing after the harvest is a very labour-intensive operation. Every prawn is presently hand packed. The possibility of utilising machine vision and robots to automate this operation has been investigated. Experiments indicate that machine vision can classify prawns into mass-related categories better than people now do, and that prawn orientation can be determined by this means. Although at the present state of technology it appears infeasible for robots to make up the multi-layer fixed-weight packs of prawns as is now done manually, a change to single-layer variable-weight packs should allow this process to be automated and would offer significant advantages to the Australian industry.