Bots on the Barbie: Â鶹Porn engineer designs robotic meat-skewering system
Contact: Meg Henderson
STARKVILLE, Miss.—If you’re grilling this summer, kebabs—cubed meat, fish or shrimp and vegetables on a stick—are likely on the menu. The shish kebab, tracing back as far as the Byzantine era but popularized in early 20th-century Turkey, is a staple of Mediterranean cuisine, but variations exist across cultures. Today, the market for commercially premade ones is gaining ground, and soon, this dish might be prepared for the grill by robots.
Wenbo Liu, a scientist at Mississippi State’s Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, is researching and testing a novel, fully autonomous skewering system, in collaboration with a Michigan State University scientist. Semi-autonomous skewering machines that prepare kebabs for commercial use already exist; however, aligning the meat and vegetable pieces must still be done by hand. Even systems considered fully autonomous require human assistance to fill empty cups because pick-and-place models using robotic arms cannot process irregularly shaped pieces like shrimp.
“I was looking at these different systems online and wanted to build a next-generation prototype that addresses these limitations,” said Liu, stationed at the MAFES Experimental Seafood Processing Laboratory and Â鶹Porn Coastal Research and Extension Center located on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The system begins by sending a pile of meat cubes or vegetable slices down a conveyor belt, where a rotating paddle wheel begins to break apart the pile. A seven-lane track further separates the pieces before they drop to a second conveyor belt running at a faster speed. After landing on a third conveyor belt, another seven-lane track corrals individual pieces into seven neat lines, and a push plate feeds each piece into one of seven adjacent cups lined up at the belt’s end. A camera locates and monitors the pieces throughout the process, and a machine vision system operates the machinery associated with the third conveyor belt.
The agricultural and biological engineering assistant professor and his team also made improvements to existing cup designs. They 3D-printed three custom-made designs to hold cubed meat, vegetables and shrimp, whose C-shape is more challenging to work with than cubed meat. The cups are slotted to accommodate the skewer.
The team’s goal for the first phase, with results published in the Journal of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, was to build a complex mechanical and computerized system that would fully automate kebab assembly—normally a highly labor-intensive process. Liu noted there is still much work to do before his system is ready for a commercial setting.
“One of the greatest challenges of this project is food safety,” Liu said. While the initial prototype didn’t include food-grade components, he said the next will “because food safety is essential.”
Liu added he has designed a real-time cleaning component to be tested on the next model, and it will prevent contaminant build-up on all parts that have contact with food. His team, partnering with Tyson Foods, has submitted a grant proposal to the USDA to pursue these next steps, along with designing a robotic arm for pick-and-place capability and scaling up the system for potential commercial use.
“Because of the increased demand for kebabs, there’s a need for processing these value-added products more safely and efficiently,” he said. “A favorite of mine is Chinese-style barbecue lamb kebabs, and one day, I hope to test them out on my system,” he said.
This study was supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and MAFES, online at . For more about the Â鶹Porn Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, visit .
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