Evolution of Standalone Lamb Chine Machine to develop dual purpose lamb/mutton chine/flap machine.

Summary

​Scott Automation and Robotics (Scott) and Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) have recently developed a range of lower throughput, standalone, manually loaded machines based on the modules that operate within the LEAP solution. The intention with these developments is that they will allow processors with lower throughput or restricted capital budget to gain some of the benefit of the LEAP system whilst at the same time procuring modules that can at a later date be pieced together to form a fully integrated LEAP solution whilst reducing re-investment in hardware.

During an evaluation of the chine machine at the host processor (HP), HP identified that there would be benefit in incorporating the flap cutting station from the Scott middle machine. This new module design would be derived from the existing middle machine design, however it is not as straightforward as isolating the chine station. The chine station requires no vision and sensing however the flap station does.

This project aimed to expand the capabilities of the chine system into mutton whilst extracting and implementing the flap cutting station by developing standalone vision and sensing and increasing the flap station capability to process mutton and lamb simultaneously.

As a result of this project a flap and chine machine has been developed and trialled. Good results have been achieved across a wide range of lamb and mutton product however it has been found that the capability to process the full range of mutton shapes and sizes still requires some further development work.