Knife-Wielding Robot Taught to Repeatedly Stab Meat

(Video Link)

Until recently, robots have been unable to replace human workers at the task of deboning meat due to the differences between individual pieces of meat. But the HAMDAS-R built by Mayekawa Electric can now debone ham effectively:

HAMDAS-R has made it possible to automate the processing of irregularly shaped, soft foods like meat. Until now, the use of robots for food processing hasn't progressed very much. That's because it's necessary to mechanize the techniques of skilled workers, and it's hard to mechanize tasks that rely on human hands. Another problem was that the cleaning and hygiene requirements of food processing plants made it difficult to introduce robots into such an environment. Until now, very little progress had been made in that regard, but HAMDAS-R enables those requirements to be met. So we hope this robot will expand the possibilities for automating the processing of irregularly shaped, soft types of food.

Nom Nom Nom.

http://www.diginfo.tv/2010/12/06/10-0250-f-en.php via Popular Science