You’ve seen the robotic hog head dropper. But there’s still a lot of pig left to butcher. With bones and stuff. How do you make a boneless ham out of all that? The HAMDAS-R Ham Boning machine.
After the ham thighs are separated from the rest of the hog, they travel on dual conveyor belts to the HAMDAS-R Ham Boning Machine where a handling arm picks them up and attaches each piece to a hanging conveyor rack. The machine snaps an x-ray image of the meat, determining the precise thickness, angle and shape of the thigh bone using eight separate spots along it as a guide.
The meat then passes between two small circular blades to separate it from the upper portion of bone before a series spring-loaded knives on three, eight-axis arms incise the meat along the bone-line. Once the meat is partially freed, another set of gripping claws peel it down and a another set of circular saws free the meat completely with a final cut.
Using X-rays, the control system gets as close to the bone as possible, leaving only slightly more leftover flesh than a seasoned butcher. So, while the The HAMDAS-R isn’t quite as efficient as a human, it’s way (like 10 times) faster. The most skilled meat-packer can process up to 50 hog legs an hour; HAMDAS-R slices-n-dices up to a whopping 500 every 60 minutes – that’s one every 7.2 seconds.
[Extreme Tech – Mayekawa]
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