Poultry processing robotics advances with ChicGrasp

What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens. Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing.