Chef Robotics, a company that specializes in AI-enabled robots for meal assembly in the food industry, announces its new piece-picking capability, enabling food manufacturers to automate discrete food items such as chicken breasts, cutlets, pork chops, burgers, patties and other food items that require individual handling. This also unlocks new markets for Chef Robotics, such as meatpacking.

Until now, Chef robots have focused on ingredients that can be scooped and portioned by weight, such as mac and cheese, rice or leafy greens. But food manufacturers also run production lines with discrete items that cannot be scooped and are picked discreetly. These ingredients need to be identified individually and placed in specific quantities and orientations per tray or bowl. Food manufacturers have traditionally relied on line workers to pick and place these discrete items. This manual work is repetitive, physically demanding and increasingly difficult to staff, given turnover rates exceeding 150% in the food manufacturing industry.

Chef's new piece-picking capability automates the handling of individual food items from unstructured totes. The capability uses AI-powered segmentation and detection models combined with color image data from RGBD cameras. This enables Chef robots segment each piece in real time, determine its surface plane and normal vector and determine the ideal picking pose (a combination of position and orientation). The utensil then precisely lifts and places it into the right compartment of a tray or bowl. The capability is powered by a custom-designed food-safe, vacuum-powered utensil that leverages the venturi effect to create suction without pulling moisture into the system, keeping ingredients at their proper moisture level and ensuring the pneumatic system isn't affected. The utensil includes multiple quick-change attachments designed for different ingredient types, ensuring gentle handling across all types.

Chef robots can pick items from unstructured containers at any angle, adapting to each piece's position rather than requiring items to lie perfectly flat. When depositing food items into meal trays, robots can place each piece in a specific orientation, ensuring a chicken breast lies flat or a sauce cup sits upright.

For food manufacturers, piece-picking expands the range of SKUs that can be automated, increases overall robot utilization across production lines and provides a 1:1 worker equivalent for discrete item handling. The capability is compatible with existing Chef robots and requires no new hardware infrastructure; manufacturers can deploy piece-picking with a simple utensil swap.

Unlike other solutions, Chef's piece-picking solution isn't custom-made for a single ingredient but is flexible enough to handle multiple ingredients. The AI model can be retrained to quickly switch from one ingredient to another.

Some of Chef's customers are already using piece-picking on their production lines for the assembly of fresh and frozen meals. The capability is now widely available to food manufacturers who wish to automate individual item handling on their meal assembly lines.

Source: Chef Robotics