Intelligent Cutter for Pork Deboning Robot (Automatic Processing of Complete Pre-Deboning Process of Pork Arm)

Abstract

Recent innovation of the robot deboning technology is remarkable. Now in Japan, 70% of deboned chicken thigh meat in the market is processed by the deboning robot, “Toridas.” The robot deboning of pork or beef, however, is still difficult because of their complexness and strong combination of meat and bone. This paper describes new intelligent cutter for pre-deboning process of pork shoulder meat, which has not been automated in robot deboning. In this research, the authors made the cutting process of the tendon and the periostea on a bone in the condition that a cutter was set perpendicularly to a bone (perpendicular cutting process), and the process which cutter was guided along the bone (parallel cutting process) was investigated how to control automatically in the both processes. The joint separation process was also developed with sensing the position of the joint by the cutter itself (a joint separation process). The process which cuts off the periosteum of the backside of the scapula was also developed. A meat peeling plate was also developed and attached to the cutter. After all, the prospect for the full-automatic pre-deboning was obtained through these studies.