Objective
The proposed demonstrator project will utilise the complementary state-of-the-art research know-how within the consortium to implement the first European production system using food grade robotics equipment designed to end-user specification. The proposal is directly relevant to the expectations of the CEC Agriculture and Fisheries programme under section 3.3.2 Advanced Technologies, dealing with robotics and automation for cutting and handling biological products such as meat.
The meat industry has reached a saturation point both in Europe and in the OECD countries, following a growth in meat consumption in the 1980s. As a consequence of the Uruguay round of GATT, the European meat industry is facing increased competition from outside the European Union, especially from the U.S. South America and New Zealand. Increased competition means companies have to improve the price and quality of their products at high levels of throughput. In manual production systems workers, who process several hundred carcasses an hour, will tire and lose concentration, leading to loss of cut accuracy and quality. Abattoirs are incurring higher production costs as they have to comply with the high levels of hygiene specified in European Council directive 91/497/EC. The industry has to contend with a shortage of labour as the available work force decreases. It also suffers from a high turnover of staff (increasing training costs) and high injury rates.
The development of a research system under a previous EC funded project has been a key breakthrough for the industry, however, the use of the methods and technologies generated by the research to date have yet to be demonstrated under production conditions.
This is intended by this proposal as a first demonstration project. In addition to Technology demonstration, the issues of hygiøne, Industrial Safety Standards, Cleanabilitv, Documentation, Training and Production Reliability will also be examined fully with specific consideration of current and new standards. The work programme leading towards the first Industrial Production Demonstrator will include a thorough examination of these issues, ensuring that subsequent production systems meet with the full expectations of the market.
Based on the considerable knowledge of two important EC funded and fully completed research projects, BE 4420 and CRAFT Cr-1582-91, this project aims to demonstrate a new industrial capability in the use of Robotics Technology for pork primal cutting. The main parties involved with the BE4420 and Cr-1582-91 projects have formed a link with a second enduser and a large technology supply company to achieve an industrial demonstration of a robotics system capable of performing selected North and South European cuts. This demonstrator project aims to achieve an on-line industrial demonstrator for pork meat production capable of achieving both North and South European primal cuts at the production speeds defined by the end-user industries in the project. It will be shown that the technology can operate reliably, economically, capable of being cleaned, whilst improving safety and hygiene. User confidence based on in-line demonstration of the system will be reached by the planned production trials of the system at a user site for hot butchery and again for cold butchery. The demonstrator will be the first such system in the world to achieve cuts currently performed by manual or semi-automatic means. The robotics cell will be moved to each of the end-user sites (Spain and Norway) to demonstrate South and North European cuts in a real production line.
The system will undergo demonstration trial for a period of 2 months at each location and except for the selection of appropriate cutter control software options, no modifications to the system will be envisaged for the demonstrations. The end result will be a generic product for the primal cutting of pork in both 'hot' and 'cold' conditions prior to exploitation. The results are expected to provide a new industrial opportunity for Europe which is estimated to be 200 million ecus over 3-6 years in the first instance resulting directly from this demonstrator project.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
You need to log in or register to use this function
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
DEM - Demonstration contractsCoordinator
88641 Uberlingen
Germany