Advanced Robotic System for Efficient Pick-and-Place of Deformable Poultry in Cluttered Bin: A Comprehensive Evaluation Approach

This research article presents an advanced robotic system designed for efficient pick-and-place of deformable poultry pieces from cluttered bins. The system incorporates a novel architecture with seamless integration of various modules, enabling the robot to handle deformable poultry with precision. It introduces a comprehensive evaluation approach to assess the system's performance, considering perception, state modeling, planning and control, gripping and manipulation. The experiments were conducted on two different samples of chicken pieces with varying weights and shapes, under complex and simple scenarios. Performance indicators, failure categories, and cycle time were used for evaluation. The evaluation revealed an overall success rate of 49.4% for picking and placing chicken pieces, with failure rates of 21.8% for perception, 30.7% for gripping, and 11% for manipulation modules. These results highlight areas of improvement, particularly in object detection, grasp pose estimation in clutter, and gripper designs for deformable products, to create a robust pick-and-place solution. The proposed robotic system and evaluation method hold immense potential for revolutionizing the meat processing industry and other food processing sectors, making automation more efficient and adaptable to meet the increasing demand in the food industry.