Robots To Stay Very Far Away From: Ham De-boning Arm
Boning ham is a tedious, repetitive task. Perfect for a robot!
This video may be NSFW if you don’t like watching raw meat get sliced up by a robot.
The reason that someone thought that giving this robot arm a razor sharp knife to stab meat with was that boning hams is a repetitive task, i.e. something that a robot would be great at. They’re probably right, and it’s an impressive technical achievement, because the robot has to be able to compensate for lots of variability in, uh, “meat form and bone size.” Using these robots, it only takes 10 people to bone 500 hams an hour instead of 20.
On the other hand, I can’t help but thing two things. First of all, this is the sort of semi-skilled labor that until very recently was not at risk for automation because of the knowledge and adaptability required. And second, we’re giving robot arms knives now. PANIC!
I’m kidding, of course.
Via [ DigInfo ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
