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Food & Agriculture
Industrial robots aren't only used for spray painting, or welding or assembly, etc.
They are also used in handling food, shearing sheep and wording in the fields. Robots with a vision faculty have
been decorating chocolates for several years.
By the mid of 1980s Imperial College in London was experimenting with what was to become the world's first robot
butcher (the robot is able to cut meat in any useful way).
- It is clear that any such device would need:
1.An array of touch and vision sensors, both to provide initial information prior to cutting
and to provide on-going information to facilities accurate control of the cutting operation.
2.Intelligence, to enable the appropriate operational decisions to be taken during the process.
It is also clear that the machine would have to be able to operate with adequate speed.
The Perth research team has built a detailed sheep map with access to this information the robot cutter is fed into position and guided by sensors to shear
the at exactly the right angle.
Efforts are also being made to produce robot milkmaids. A research team at the agriculture and food research council
institute of Engineering and research near Bedford in England has developed the necessary theory and carried out
a number of practical trials. Cows would go up to milking robots when the required relief and the robots would
recognize the cows by means of identity tags. The robot would then apply a vacuum cluster of 4 cups on to the teats,
sense when the milk was running dry, remove the cups and then clean up. The milk could be collected each day without
the need for the cows to be brought back each day for milking.
The researcher Fred E. has described other robot applications in the agricultural environment. Sistler (1987) of
the Louisiana agriculture experiment station at Louisiana State University in the USA.
Did you know ?
That robot eyes are also used to detect faulty potato chips (French fries), to sort and grade cucumbers, to inspect
chocolate candy coatings and to detect defective pizza crusts?
In 1985 in Japan, Kondo and Kawamure have focused on robotic systems for harvesting fruit from trees (a video camera
guides the robot gripper to the fruit) and on an automatic grain combine (Kawamure, 1983).
Years later in 1989 Joseph Engelberger mentions the use of mobile robots in Japanese restaurant. It is obvious
that Japanese robots can fetch cassettes for students in libraries, they can just collect meals from kitchens and
deliver them to hungry customers.
