Robets are coming!

摘要

New robotic designs promise to make robotics practical in the poultry industry. For more than a decade, the poultry industry has looked to robotics technology as a possible means of automating some of its more challenging materials handling tasks. Conventional "hard" automation concepts, which the industry has relied on so heavily, have been unable to handle the flexibility and performance demands of most of these activities. Continued reliance on manually performing these tasks is a situation forwhich many companies wish there were practical options. Unfortunately, the robotics industry has been slow in offering systems capable of meeting the speed, cost and performance needs of the poultry industry. Early commercial robotic offerings have beenwith systems primarily developed for the automotive and electronics industries where precision accuracy is a major design feature. With high precision comes higher system costs, speed limitations and a degree of operational complexity that has continuedto keep robotic usage in the industry to a minimum. However, that may be about to change.