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Researchers Make Progress in Design of Non-Robotic System for Chiller
Rehang
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Gary McMurray, senior research engineer and project director,
says initial conceptual testing of the system has been very positive.
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Over the past year, researchers with Georgia Tech’s Agricultural
Technology Research Program (ATRP) have made significant strides in
their quest to develop a non-robotic system for rehanging birds exiting
an immersion chiller onto a transfer shackle line. In so doing, they
are helping to automate a process that is limiting processing efficiencies
in many poultry processing plants.
Traditional processing equipment
is limited in its capability to handle complex product presentation.
In contrast, robotic systems have servo-drive
motors that are used to construct multiple degree of freedom systems
that offer tremendous flexibility in tackling such challenges, but
at a considerably higher price. These advanced robotic systems typically
require additional sensor systems, such as vision systems, in order
to accomplish the task.
In tackling the post-chill rehang challenge,
ATRP researchers are seeking to design a system that integrates some
of the flexibility of robotic
systems with the cost savings of a more traditional design. The concept
is based on the use of a multitude of simple mechanisms networked
together in conjunction with advanced sensor feedback for command and
control
decisions to achieve the designed performance.
Specifically, the non-robotic
system incorporates a funnel conveyor, pneumatic orientation stations,
a vision system, and a hanging box
for shackling. As the birds move through the system, they are oriented
in each successive step until all exit in the same position and orientation
prior to being hung on a moving shackle line.
All poultry plants in
the United States use immersion chilling to cool birds and manually
rehang carcasses back onto shackles for second and
further processing. This typically requires four to eight persons
per line to meet production requirements.
“In addition to the benefit of reducing labor demands, integrating
grading and sorting features into the device offers the promise of
more cost-effective
automated routing technology. This type of integration can be of tremendous
value to a plant,” says Gary McMurray, senior research engineer
and project director.
McMurray says initial conceptual testing of the
system has been very positive.
While this initial work is aimed at the chiller rehang application,
the research team strongly feels that this technology has immediate
application to other material handling tasks in poultry plants (cone
loading and whole bird transfer) as well as in other industries (turkey,
red meat, and pork) where whole product is manually transferred to
a conveyance system.
“The impact of this technology on not only the poultry industry
but the meat processing industry is potentially very significant. For
the
poultry industry, the transformation of this task into an automated
task that is tightly integrated with grading and weighing systems is
very significant. The system also has the potential of handling gas-stunned
birds at the beginning of the kill line. For other meat industries,
this paradigm has the ability to perform material transfer operations
and machine loading tasks that could not be automated using traditional
automation or robotic techniques,” adds McMurray.
Photography by Steven Thomas, GTRI.
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