What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens.
Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing.
"Embodied AI is used to create intelligent, agent-like robotics to interact with a real-world environment," said Dongyi Wang, leader of the project and an assistant professor in the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Food Science.
"It's a physical art that has just developed in the past couple of years, which you see in things like full self-driving cars," he said. "We are trying to do similar things using that imitation learning idea, but in chicken processing."
Source : uark.edu