The future of the meat industry and industrial robot arms

When think­ing about ways that indus­tri­al robot arms are used, the meat indus­try may not spring to mind. Most like­ly, peo­ple think first of auto­mo­tive or elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing. How­ev­er, the meat indus­try is cur­rent­ly using indus­tri­al robot­ic arms, and is plan­ning to inte­grate even more automa­tion in the near future.

Many of these indus­tri­al robot arms are in meat-pro­cess­ing plants and are used to carve up ani­mal car­cass­es. For exam­ple, Jarvis is a hoof cut­ting robot. This Motoman 50kg robot arm has a vision sys­tem and cut­ting blades to auto­mat­i­cal­ly cut hooves off of beef car­cass­es that come in to be processed. Accord­ing to a report from Marel Food Sys­tems, this sys­tem has been in most major meat-pro­cess­ing plants since late 2007.

Anoth­er indus­tri­al robot arm is used to scribe bee, a job that is not only tedious and demand­ing, but can also be haz­ardous to humans, and requires extreme accu­ra­cy. The Beef Scriber is an indus­tri­al robot arm that is fit with a tung­sten tipped cir­cu­lar saw and 3D laser sensors.

The plan of the indus­try is to make these kinds of robot­ic indus­tri­al arms more avail­able to small­er mar­kets, and make them more uni­ver­sal for meat processing.

While this process is high­ly auto­mat­ed already, the meat indus­try would like to fur­ther auto­mate their sys­tem, and is cur­rent­ly devis­ing lean­er, more effi­cient ways to break down and debone var­i­ous ani­mal carcasses.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor of Fanuc, Motoman, Uni­ver­sal Robots, ABB, and KUKA robot­ics, has sev­er­al indus­tri­al robot arms avail­able for cus­tomiza­tion and pur­chase. Many of the mod­els avail­able are food-grade and able to work in meat-pro­cess­ing and oth­er food and agri­cul­tur­al industries.

If you are look­ing to auto­mate any of your industry’s han­dling or removal process­es, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.