The COVID-19 pandemic strained many poultry processing plants as employees became ill and missed work. With the help of a $1 million grant, Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station researchers will design robotics to help alleviate that potential strain.
The project is funded through a joint proposal between the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative 3.0 and the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Dongyi Wang, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering, is the principal investigator on the project. Wang conducts research for the experiment station, the research arm of the U of A System Division of Agriculture. He also has a research appointment with the Food Science Department and a teaching appointment with the College of Engineering.
A major focus in Wang’s lab is to understand what jobs robotic and automated systems can accomplish.
Poultry Processing Plants
In 2021, the U.S. produced 59.2 billion pounds of broiler chickens, according to the USDA. Arkansas ranked No. 3 in the nation, producing 1 billion broilers — 7.46 billion pounds of meat worth $3.97 billion — in 2021, according to the 2022 Arkansas Agriculture Profile.
Many of the steps to process chicken are already automated in processing plants, Wang said. Slaughtering and evisceration do not rely heavily on people. Rehanging the raw chicken is one of the major steps that relies on human work. Workers on the processing line hang the birds on conveyor lines that continue to the deboning, wing-cutting and packing steps.
Lending a Hand
Besides Wang, the team includes co-principle investigators Wan Shou, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the U of A, and Yu She, assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University. Casey Owens, Novus International professor of poultry science, and Philip Crandall, professor of food science, both with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, will also be involved.
To create the automation system, the researchers will customize tactile sensory grippers and develop a high-resolution and high-speed 3D imaging system, Wang said. The 3D imaging system will allow the robotic arms to differentiate between the topmost chicken and the rest of the pile and will indicate the predetermined key points for chicken grasping. A key challenge is developing a gripper that reliably grasps the chicken without damaging the meat.
Shou will design the tactile sensors and She will design the robotic hand. By integrating these developments, robots will be enabled to adjust their grip to ensure the bird is secure.
They will test the robotics in the experiment station’s pilot chicken processing plant, with Owens overseeing the quality of meat handled by the robotic arms. The team will also use this project for opportunities in education and, with the help of Crandall, extension activities that target poultry and broader food industries.
Wang visualizes this project benefitting the scientific areas of tactile sensing, 3D imaging, dual robotic control and algorithms. He also sees it benefitting the poultry industry itself.
Center to Study Adaptation of AI to Meat Processing
Researchers Dongyi Wang and Yanbin Li, Distinguished Professor of biological and agricultural engineering, are part of a $5 million grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture that will establish the Center for Scalable and Intelligent Automation in Poultry Processing. Led by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, the center brings together researchers from five institutions in three states for efforts to adapt robotic automation to chicken meat processing. U of A researchers will receive $2.2 million from the grant primarily to focus on food safety automation for poultry processing plants.