ARMS : a multi arms robotic system for muscle separation – ARMS

Nowadays, the meat industry, which is the largest sector of Agro and Food Industries, has to face important problems relative to a shortage of qualified labor, due to the dangerous, hard and strenuous working conditions (important working and musculoskeletal illness rate resulting in high absenteeism rate compared to other industry), and competition with others meat producing countries with low labor costs. As a consequence, mechanization/robotization of meat processing operations has today become a crucial challenge to increase competiveness of companies. The overall objective of the ARMS project is to study the robotization of bovine muscle and bone separation in meat cutting and transformation processes, applied on beef rounds (hindquarters).

An innovative multi-arms robotic system will be considered, combining robotic multi-arms control methods and algorithms to achieve simultaneously four main identified mechanical actions (handling, pulling, pushing and/or cutting), on three different kinds of meat constituting objects: rigid (such as bones), rigid-articulated (such as knee-joints) and deformable (such as meat muscles). Leading edge technologies, such as smart sensors and active perception, will have to be integrated to extract relevant information in real time from the muscle and the robotic tasks environment. Efficient tracking algorithm will sent appropriated data to the global control framework of the system. To remain aware of the difficulties of the separation tasks (robotic challenges, variability of the meat objects), we expect to validate this subsystem separately. Multi (single, dual…) arms manipulations will be the cases studies using vision and force sensor modalities in order to validate the multi arms systems itself. Holding and handling will be designed and validated using the existing robotic platform and real meat. Finally, global integration and assessment will be done through two operational scenarios: muscle/muscle separation and muscle bone separation.

The consortium is composed of three academic partners (IRCCYN, LAMI, LASMEA), one industrial partner (CLEMESSY) and one Technical Center working in the field of meat industry (ADIV). IRRCYN and LASMEA are well known in control area of different kind of robot. IRCCYN and LaMI are specialists in robot modeling. LASMEA has a great and long experience in vision and visual servoing applications. LaMI is specialist in design and in structural synthesis methodologies. CLEMESSY is a company working mainly in integration of automated and robotized cells. Finally ADIV has an excellent expertise on deboning and cutting procedures and makes the links between industrial partners and academic.
ADIV, LaMI and LASMEA are all involved in a Technical Joint Unit called “UMT08: Mechanization/Robotization in the Meat Production Sector”. This Technical Joint Unit has decided to address the difficult problem of cutting, deboning and muscle separation of beef round.

Final assessment will be conducted in the ADIV site near the meat platform. Multi arms cell will be partly funded by the ARMS project as the global amount will be over 300k€. Main funds will come from CPER (Auvergne region) through the INNOV@POLE project.