Intelligent Automated Transfer of Live Birds to Shackle Line

In their report – "Continuation of Automated Chicken Processing Research" – the researchers, Dr Kok-Meng Lee from The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr Bruce Webster, from the Department of Poultry Science, University of Georgia, Gary McMurray from the Food Processing Technology Division, Georgia Tech Research Institute and Dr Richard J. Buhr from the USDA-ARS, Russell Research Center, Athens, said that the project continued to make good progress in developing an automated system for transferring live birds from a moving conveyor belt to a moving shackle line.

The project team focused on three tasks:

1. Develop methods to integrate/synchronise previously developed individual processes, which include singulating randomly oriented birds on an incoming conveyor, separating singulated birds to maintain uniform spacing, and body-grasping processes.
2. Develop methods to integrate an electrical stunner in the humane transfer system.
3. Design a prototype for the continuous handling of a large number of live birds for use in a field evaluation.

The researchers investigated two preliminary-handler designs for integrating previously developed individual processes: singulating randomly oriented birds on an incoming conveyor and shackling both legs of the bird, with inverting/stunning/transferring of the bird to a moving kill-line; multi-conveyor preliminary handler and sensor-based active singulation.

Experiments showed that birds react to motion-related changes as they move from one conveyor to the next. Although birds 'rehabitualise' when they experience more than one handling, the multi-conveyor system takes up excessive room space.

To minimise the number of conveyors and the undesirable bird reaction, an active singulation algorithm was developed which estimates the spacing between two incoming birds with line-scan sensors which control bird arrival.

Motivated by the desire to eliminate wing-flapping due to free-fall inversion, the group compared two classes of designs to integrate electrical stunning immediately after the bird legs are shackled.

In the first, birds are cradled while undergoing electrical stunning and neck-cut or decapitation before being transferred to the moving kill line shackles.

The second design bases its principle on an earlier version patented by Georgia Tech (US Patent 7,134,956) except that birds are shackled on a separate track.

Tests with live birds confirmed the concept feasibility of body-supported inversion to eliminate wing flapping.

"The interest to shorten the time for technology transfer from laboratory prototype to shop-floor implementation led us to direct our efforts towards designing a human-assisted sensor-based live-bird transfer system," the researchers said in their report. It is based on the second design which offers two major advantages of low-cost and high-throughput. Through realistic simulation, the prototype design for continuous handling of large numbers of live birds has been numerically demonstrated. "We have also formed a team with several equipment companies (Georgia Mechatronics LLC previously InControl Inc., Banner, Turck, Stober and Fuji) to seek additional funding from the Georgia FoodPAC to design and fabricate an industrial-hardened prototype for experiments with large numbers of birds," the research team said.