Applying vision guidance in robotic fresh meat handling

Abstract

In this paper we present a visually guided robotic system to manipulate irregular pieces of meat in a cooking ham manufacturing process. Visual sensing and manipulation have been combined in an open-loop fashion in order to avoid specialized and expensive pipelined pixel processing hardware. Special attention has been paid to the image analysis introducing a robust contour algorithm. This algorithm is well suited for real time applications due to the inherent local processing of the image near the contour elements. Using this contour a trajectory that guarantees a secure apprehension of this slippery product is determined.