2 hours ago
Poultry processing robotics advances with ChicGrasp
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119477
INTRO: 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.”
The work has been supported by a $1 million grant from a joint program between the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. Wang is a faculty member in the College of Engineering and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas. The experiment station is the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IURYkUaIiIM
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IURYkUaIiIM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119477
INTRO: 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.”
The work has been supported by a $1 million grant from a joint program between the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. Wang is a faculty member in the College of Engineering and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas. The experiment station is the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IURYkUaIiIM