Martin Yan can debone a chicken in 18 seconds. That’s pretty good, for a human. The next generation of Mayekawa automatic deboners, however, will huck a bird like an ear of corn in just under 2.5 seconds.
This Mayekawa Automatic Chicken Deboner shucks chickens at a rate of 1500 birds an hour – that’s 10 times as fast as even the most skilled butcher – and retails for around $US560,000. The system uses a specially built image processing system that modifies the path of the blades to maximise yield. As Atsushi Suzuki, Assistant Marketing Manager of the food processing division, explains, “It recognises images taken by the camera and changes the depth and location for the cuts for each chicken.” Then, it grabs the chicken by the wings and simply pulls the meat from the rib cage. The system then makes another shallow incision to remove any remaining white meat from the breastbone before discarding the bones and giblets.
Here’s the Mayekawa powering through chicken carcasses:
And here’s Martin “Slow Poke” Yan deboning a chicken in 18 seconds:
[Mayekawa, DigInfo via CrunchGear]