RoBUTCHER Meat Factory Cell completes its first cuts!

The RoBUTCHER project has recently reached an important milestone, with its first successful dissections of a pork shoulder from an entire carcass, in the Meat Factory Cell located at NMBU, Norway. This has been a challenging task, having the two robots and various sub-systems function together as one to achieve this goal. There has been a lot of development since completing physical construction of the cell hardware – of robot code, of the AI and of the unique software system that glues everything together. After a several months of testing, iteration, and many failures, now we start to see a more reliable process.

The team continues to refine the process and is also now applying this learning to other cuts, namely dissection of the ham. That will bring about its own challenges, but much of the hard work is already done. The success comes at an exciting time for the project, which plans more industrial-like testing of the system starting early 2023.