20237044239232

Background:
The poultry industry is the largest meat industry in the world, and the United States is the world's no. 1 producer of poultry meat. The consumption of chicken products has steadily increased in recent decades, and this demand will likely continue into the foreseeable future.

While the current poultry industry is centralized and designed to produce food efficiently, several operations such as meat deboning rely heavily on manual labor. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that this reliance on manual labor makes the system vulnerable to disruptions. Manufacturing tasks in these facilities required many workers to stand side-by-side, without the ability to telework or operate equipment remotely.

During the pandemic, the infection spread quickly among meat processing workers, disrupting the supply chain. High human-food contact can also lead to cross-contamination resulting in food safety recalls. The poultry and meat industry is currently facing unprecedented challenges of labor shortages and food and worker safety.

The meat processing industry stands to benefit by more fully embracing transformative technical principles such as sensing, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence. That said, the current capabilities of robotics and automation cannot yet compete with the dexterity and flexibility of human workers. Animals are highly variable, requiring intelligent and adaptive automation to handle the soft and variable meat tissues.

With the U.S. meat manufacturing industry gradually recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, now is the opportune time for the meat processing industry to reinvent itself and play a major role in addressing global protein needs, increasing processing efficiency, minimizing meat quality loss, alleviating the pressure of labor force shortage, protecting worker safety, improving worker welfare, and the work environment.

Overall Goals and Objectives:
The vision of the Center for Scalable and Intelligent Automation in Poultry Processing (CSI-APP) is to incorporate advanced technologies in robotics, artificial intelligence, digital sensing, biosensing, and food safety to provide U.S. poultry processing industry scalable and intelligent solutions to meet the rising national and global demand in poultry products. The long-term goal focuses on transforming current mass manufacturing protocols in large, centralized processing plants to mass customization protocols suitable for processing plants in different scales to overcome the inherent variability associated with raw biological materials and humans. Large-scale individualization can be achieved economically through the integration of digital and physical systems (Industry 4.0 principles).

In pursuit of the vision and the long-term goal, CSI-APP will strategically target value creation and technological innovation by performing focused engineering research and extension activities by following four unifying objectives in this proposal:

Objective 1: Scalable Poultry Manufacturing.
The team will create a scalable plant-ready intelligent robotic deboning system capable of performing at parity with (or even exceeding) human deboners for the most skilled task in the plant: shoulder cutting of front-halves. Artificial intelligence algorithms will be developed to handle the high biological variability of meat.

Objective 2: Virtual Reality-Based Workforce Transformation.
The labor shortage is a major challenge for the meat industry. It takes considerable time to train an individual to perform dexterous jobs like meat deboning. Due to high line speeds in a cold, humid environment, there are injuries resulting in labor shortages. During the pandemic, the infection spread quickly among meat processing workers, disrupting the supply chain. Virtual reality can transform, diversify, and distribute the workforce in space and time. Using the proposed VR technology, someone will be able to stay in a comfortable environment and virtually operate a robot to debone meat in a processing plant remotely. This has the potential to reduce labor shortage and create job opportunities everywhere, including rural areas.

Objective 3: Sensor and Robotic-Based Product Evaluation and Bio-Mapping for Enhancing Food Quality and Safety.
A mobile robotic platform containing biosensors for rapid estimation of bacteria will be developed. The biosensors will provide initial biomapping of bacteria in the processing plant and identify the best areas to collect swab samples of the product and environmental surfaces for food safety evaluations. The final biomap will be used to guide sanitation and management decisions. An imaging system will also be developed for detecting foreign objects like small plastics in meat and food quality evaluation.

Objective 4: Research and Extension Integration: Create an Innovation Ecosystem through Technology Development/Transfer and Workforce Education.
Research and extension activities will be integrated, accelerating the technology transformation to better meet stakeholders' needs. Planned activities include surveys to identify barriers, workshops for disseminating information about advanced technologies, demonstration exhibits at industry conferences, and one-on-one technical support for industries considering implementation of these technologies.

Expected Outcomes:
CSI-APP is structured to (1) enhance the robustness and scalability of precision manufacturing in meat processing and chicken deboning; (2) distribute the workforce in space and time using virtual reality systems; (3) improve food quality and safety in processing plants using intelligent automation, real-time vision sensing, biosensing and biomapping; and (4) collect stakeholder feedback of digitalization transformation in the meat industry and disseminate the technology to the stakeholders. This contribution will be significant because it is expected to transform the poultry industry to a more digitized and automated industry, with enhanced labor safety and food quality/safety. The scalable and transferrable technology is expected to be adaptable to smaller chicken processors, which is beneficial for the economic development of rural areas. A distributed network of smaller producers/processors that can also supply chickens to local clients efficiently to protect the food supply from aggressive attacks and the spread of pathogens. On fundamental, applied, and extension levels, the long-term outcomes of CSI-APP can be adapted to allied food industries benefiting the U.S. and global economy, but the potential impact of CSI-APP goes far beyond this. Making the mass customization of protein manufacturing a reality will contribute to long-term environmental sustainability in food production and to well-being around the world by providing a safe and affordable source of protein.

Project Team:
CSI-APP connects four core institutes: University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, Georgia Tech Research Institute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Fort Valley State University, along with a key collaborator from USDA ARS National Poultry Research Center. An interdisciplinary team from the four institutions aims to uncover the engineering and technologies to enable scalable, intelligent, efficient, safe, and transformable meat manufacturing systems to enhance worker safety, food safety, and process efficiency. CSI-APP's industrial board consists of 12 representative stakeholders related to the project from (1) poultry companies in large, medium, and small sizes; (2) food manufacturing and automation companies; and (3) industry associations with backgrounds spanning poultry production, poultry processing, food technologies, and intelligent food system development.

Division Of Agriculture Of The University Of Arkansas

10.310 - Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI)

Institute of Food Production and Sustainability (IFPS) [USDA - NIFA]

Fayetteville, Arkansas 72704-6898 United States

Single Zip Code

Agriculture and Food Research Initiative - Foundational and Applied Science Program (USDA-NIFA-AFRI-009003)

COVID-19 $4,621,702 (92%) percent of this Project Grant was funded by COVID-19 emergency acts including the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.