At the recent Fourth Robot Awards, in Japan, two industrial food-processing robots took top prizes. The first is a machine that looks downright terrifying -- just a long, sleek robot arm with a gleaming knife welded to one end. It's the HAMDAS-R, developed by Mayekawa Electric, and it's designed to remove ham bones -- a lot of them. Five hundred in an hour, this is twice as fast as a human’s capability to debone a ham.
What helped HAMDAS-R clinch the top prize in the Small Business and Venture category is the fact that it can differentiate between bone and flesh, a feature that robots till date lacked.
Image Credit: Mayekawa Mfg. Co., Ltd.
A robot butcher works twice as fast as human butchers. HAMDAS-R, developed by Japan's Mayekawa Electric, is an intelligent device that uses a sharp knife to debone up to 500 hams per hour. It's seen as a step forward in food processing, a hard area to automate because of machines' inability, until now, to distinguish between meat and bone. It is smart enough to change its instructions on-the-fly to account for different meat forms and bone sizes
In the Service Robot category, the Excellence Award went to Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization for a robot that, amazingly, can harvest strawberries. The 'bot uses double cameras to both get an image of the target berry in 3D and also to detect colour, which means it can tell the differences between what's ripe and what's not. It then snips the stalk without damaging the berry, all in a manner of nine seconds per berry.