In America alone, about 250,000 prepare the beef, pork, and chicken that ends up on dinner tables. Unlike in the past, they work in large meat processing plants. A modern meat processing plant is a far cry from your grandfather’s butcher shop. A single person’s job to turn an entire animal into cuts of meat has been divided into pieces with titles like chuck boner, tender puller, back splitter, knuckle dropper, tail ripper. Large beef companies like JBS, Cargill, and Tyson have turned a butcher’s job into a production line. A yearly paycheck is a huge chunk of these companies operating costs. For instance, JBS pays out more than $100 million in paychecks to its 3,000 employees in a single plant alone. On top of it, there are issues like food contamination, workers’ safety, and precision in meat cuts. Hence, robot butchers with X-ray vision emerge.
Challenges in Meat Cut—safety, precision, compliance, and cost
Meat processing plants are dangerous and working condition is harsh. In addition to labor costs, workers’ safety is a big issue. Animal slaughtering and processing houses suffer from personal injury concerns. While cutting and trimming carcasses, a moment of distraction could cause serious injury. Despite a steady drop, it’s still a cause of concern. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, injuries in the meatpacking industry are 2.5 times higher than the American national average. Furthermore, human workers can taint foods with pathogens as a human sneeze or get colds risking the propagation of germs and bacteria.
Contrary to human workers, robots are considerably more sanitized. They do not get cold and sneeze, subsequently reducing the propagation of germs and bacteria. Moreover, unlike humans, they can be washed with high-pressure water and solvents. Robots found jobs first in the automobile industry, later on in the electronic and metal industries. Finally, the meat processing industry is targeting robot butchers. But to qualify for these jobs, they need to have adequate sensing and perception capability to precisely determine the locations of cuts. They need to figure out fat, meat, and bone content precisely for planning the cutting operation. Hence, robot sensory technology is a challenge.
In addition to the vision system, robot butchers need to employ a force-feedback algorithm that can detect the transition from meat to bone for controlling the cutting knife to move along the surface of the bone while maintaining a constant force. For example, maintaining contact with the bone is essential for allowing the knife to cut all the ligaments around the shoulder joint. Hence, developing a robot butcher is not just adding a sharp knife at the end of a robotic arm and focusing on motion planning.
Drivers for robot butchers
On top of it, there is a competition and compliance issue. On the other hand, there have been recent advancements in sensors, high-performance computational chips, and computer vision algorithms. Therefore, vision-guided robots are fining entry to automate meat production processes. So far, dexterous tasks, needed the ability to deal with variation, multi-modal sensing needs, and steep technology barriers to entry in automated processes have reduced the spread of robotics in the meat processing industry. Among many advantages, precision and safety are important.
X-ray vision-guided robot butcher
Visual sensors like cameras produce information about the surfaces of carcasses only. But this information is not sufficient enough for the robots to produce cuts of meat. They need to know the position of bones and fat distribution, among others, to plan the operation. Therefore, robot butcher developers have been adopting an x-sensor-based vision system to guide robots. One of the notable developments is taking place in the Scott-JBS joint venture. It’s being reported, “The first robot takes X-rays and a CT scan of the carcass, which generates a 3D model of its shape and size. Based on what the system sees in the model, another bot drives rotary knives between the ribs and cuts through the hanging carcass, using the spinal cord as a reference point.
“Unlike humans, real-time (high speed) x-ray and CT scan equipped robots can be seen through the carcass. As a result, robot butchers can perform the job in a more precise manner, addressing the quality issue. They also maximize the yield of the production of different meat products from the same carcass.
X-ray vision robot butcher makes the cut with far higher precision than butchers do. For example, an experiment of robot cuts produces two cuts exactly at 160mm apart. On the other hand, two manual operators sawing one after the other produced lots more variation – 160, 140, 150. Therefore, Robot butchers’ yield is consistent every time.
Unfolding of Robot Butcher with x-ray vision
In 2016, Brazil-based protein powerhouse JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, showed interest in automating the art of butchery. They went out and bought a controlling share of Scott Technology, a New Zealand-based robotics firm demonstrating x-ray vision-guided robot butcher. In 2016, Business Insider reported that Scott’s automated meat processing robots were able to extract different cuts from lamb, pig, and beef carcasses. They needed just one person to supervise the lamb boning rooms where about a dozen robots strip the meat from 600 carcasses an hour.
Despite some limitations, there are indications eventually, this robotic solution will grow as a better substitute to manual operation. Moreover, there is a competition issue. Hence, major meat producers are showing increasing interest to turn their meat processing plants into robot butcher shops. . In July 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that the coronavirus outbreak cupelled a major meat processor Tyson to turn into robot butchers.
Job loss and food safety issues
On average, one person needs to perform a butcher job to supply meat to food plates of 1000 people. For example, among 25 million people in Australia, 30,000 are butchers (0.12%). Due to x-ray vision-guided robot butchers, these jobs are under threat. All across the western world, the number could be significant. Due to food safety and productivity, these robot butchers will also enter developing countries like China and India. Hence, robot butchers will kill millions of jobs. In some instances, a local community could be threatened. For sample, Brooks, a Canadian town with a population of 15,000, is prospecting a bleak outlook due to the major employer JBS’s move to lay off a lion share of 2800 people with Robot butchers.
Due to the progression of sensing and perception capability, robots are gaining increasing comparative advantage to deal with variations. Even they are getting far better than human workers in a certain situation. Consequently, robots will keep taking over growing jobs from humans. However, in addition to delivering better quality, they will also be causing less wastage and offering safer options. Hence, the advancement of robots is vital for continued progression. On the other hand, the job loss issue needs to be dealt with. Therefore, we should also consider desperate attempts to create additional employment opportunities and the progression of robotics.
