Robotics and Food Technology: A Mini Review

Food industry and engineering—Quo vadis?

Robotics in the food industry: an update

Industrial robots with an open architecture have been applied to several tasks such as machining, sanding, polishing and so on. The open architecture allows system engineers to realize desirable teachingless operation. However, transplantation of an application software to other makers' industrial robots is not easy even though having an open architecture, because the specifications of interface between PC and robots differ respectively. That is the reason why the standardization of industrial robots' interfaces is now being expected and desired from robotic users. Recently, ORiN (Open Robot/Resource interface for the Network) is gathering attention as a promising middleware for the standardization of robotic interfaces. In this paper, trajectory following control based on cutter location data (CL data) is developed on ORiN interface for an educational small robot VE026A with six-DOFs. The ORiN middleware is available on the robot. Trajectory following control of an end-effector attached to the flange of the robot is a basic but important strategy for robotic application without using any robot languages. The design with ORiN interface and its experiment are shown.

The acquisition costs for industrial robots have been steadily decreasing in past years. Nevertheless, they still face significant drawbacks in the required effort for the preparation of complex robot tasks which causes these systems to be rarely present so far in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that focus mainly on small volume, high variant manufacturing. In this paper, we propose a camera-based path planning framework that allows the fast preparation and execution of robot tasks in dynamic environments which leads to less planning overhead, fast program generation and reduced cost and hence overcomes the major impediments for the usage of industrial robots for automation in SMEs with focus on low volume and high variant manufacturing. The framework resolves existing problems in different steps. The exact position and orientation of the workpiece are determined from a 3D environment model scanned by an optical sensor. The so retrieved information is used to plan a collision-free path that meets the boundary conditions of the specific robot task. Experiments show the potential and effectiveness of the the framework presented here by evaluating a case study.

STEP-NC Based Industrial Robot CAM System

The increased usage of mobile robots in the industrial context entails higher safety risks for employees on the production floor. To enable safety, the usage of security concepts on industrial mobile robots is essential. One step towards security is authentication that is necessary to prevent unauthorized people from manipulating an industrial mobile robot’s software or configuration. Traditional authentication schemes that utilize username and password are not feasible for industrial mobile robots as either (a) a remote connection would be necessary to check the credentials or (b) the credentials need to be checked locally on the robot. Remote connections are problematic due to connectivity problems similar to them at RoboCup Logistics League competitions. If the credentials need to be checked on the robot, the usernames and passwords of all authorized people need to be stored and maintained there. As both possibilities are not feasible for industrial mobile robots, we propose an offline authentication approach that uses biometric data to authenticate a user on a mobile robot. The approach uses expiring passwords and a smart card to authenticate authorized people on the mobile robot. The smart card is equipped with a fingerprint reader to check that only authorized people are allowed to authenticate at a mobile robot. To show that the approach is able to provide secured authentication, a threat analysis is performed.

Many tasks in the meat processing industry involve repetitive and physically demanding work. Therefore, the workers are highly susceptible to repetitive-strain injuries to their hands, wrists, elbows, and back. Additionally, quality control and hygiene requirements are vital to this industry. For these reasons, industrial robots have been considered for automating processes such as animal slaughtering, meat cutting and meat selecting. This paper presents an assessment of the requirements for industrial robots in meat processing. Results from a conducted study are disclosed for the existing and potential robotic applications. The meat processes in detail, requirements, challenges and barriers of robotic automation are described, robotic research activities are introduced, existing robotic applications are analyzed and studied and potential applications are proposed and discussed.

Robotics has found applications in many areas of the food industry, including for shelf-life, cost reduction and flexibility, packaging, transportation, canning, beverages, food supply chains, milking, confectionary, harvesting of tree fruits, etc. This chapter focuses on current opportunities for robotic applications in the food industry.

With the advent of the Industry 4.0 era, the application of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial fields has greatly increased. Intelligent collaborative robots or smart cobots enable high flexibility by combining the human ability to adapt to new tasks with automated robots (precision, repeatability) performance. This paper will analyze the current application status and usage of collaborative robots in the various industrial fields, and its benefits and disadvantages from the discussion. Firstly, this paper the defines collaborative robots and explains the difference between cobots and traditional industrial robots. Then, it analyzes the specific application cases of collaborative robots in automotive manufacturing, electronics and electrical appliances, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Subsequently, this paper introduces the main technologies linked to collaborative robots, including sensors, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), machine learning and safety technologies. Through the study of actual application cases, this paper summarizes the significant advantages of collaborative robots to improve productivity, reduce costs, and optimize the working environment. Meanwhile, this paper also discusses the current technical challenges, regulatory and standard issues as well as marketing difficulties for collaborative robots, and looks at future development trends and research directions. The results demonstrate that the utilization of collaborative robots in industry has a promising future and research and practical significance as well

Robots in food systems: A review and assessment of potential uses

With the development of modern advanced manufacturing technology, on-line measurement technology for manufacturing field has been widely used. In this paper, a method for generating guiding path in the field of industrial robot machining is presented. Firstly, the laser profilometer is driven by an industrial robot to scan the workpiece to be measured, and the feature point information of the workpiece is extracted according to the measurement requirements. Then the feature point information is converted to the robot base coordinate system by combining the hand-eye relationship and the robot terminal pose information. Finally, the corresponding machining offset trajectory is generated according to the feature point information after 3D reconstruction, so as to realize the robot's machining trajectory guidance requirements.

In this paper the singular configurations of wrist-partitioned 6R serial robots in general, and the KUKA KR-15/2 industrial robot in particular, are analytically described and classified. While the results are not new, the insight provided by the geometric analysis for users of such robots is. Examining the problem in the joint axis parameter space, it is shown that when the end-effector reference point is taken to be the wrist centre the determinant of the associated Jacobian matrix splits into four factors, three of which can vanish. Two of the three potentially vanishing factors give a complete description of the positioning singularities and the remaining one a complete description of the orientation singularities, in turn providing a classification scheme.

Remanufacturing has enormous economic and environmental benefits in terms of resource conservation and environmental protection. Disassembly, as an essential step in remanufacturing, is always manually executed, it has the disadvantages of high labor intensive, time consuming and low efficiency while robotic disassembly can cover the shortages of manual disassembly. During the robotic disassembly process, considering the structure and movement characteristics of the industrial robot, the industrial robot need to perform collision avoidance movements considering the obstacle caused by the End-of-Life (EoL) product. The moving time considering the robotic collision avoidance trajectory is a non-negligible part of total disassembly time. In this paper, robotic disassembly sequence planning (RDSP) considering robotic collision avoidance trajectory is proposed. This method is used to obtain the collision avoidance trajectory and the moving time between different disassembly points by the robotic collision avoidance model established in this paper. Afterwards, an optimized discrete bee algorithm (ODBA) is used to generate the optimal disassembly sequence to minimize the total disassembly time. Finally, case studies based on a gear pump verify the effectiveness of proposed methods.

A possible reconceptualization of food engineering discipline

1 - Recent Advances in the Application of Nanotechnology in Food Industry and the Vast Vision for the Future