DEVELOPING WASHABLE ROBOTS

摘要

A good bath at the end of a day? Researchers at Geor-giaTech's Research Institute (GTRI) have prototyped a washable robot to enable the automation of meat processing. At GTRI's Food ProcessingTechnol-ogy Division, research engineer Jonathan Holmes describes the design accomplishment: "The robot's job is to grasp raw meat products from a conveyor and place them onto foam packaging trays-one per second. In that cycle time, the robot picks up the product, places it aesthetically on the tray and allows visual inspection-all without causing damage." The tough part of the development, Holmes says, was having to go through a lot of component testing initially just to find components they could use.