April 7, 2016

Marel develops "intelligent poultry batching" with RoboBatcher and I-Cut

Marel Poultry has developed "a robot with a knife", an innovative concept for intelligent fixed-weight poultry batching.

The process involves the interaction between the I-Cut 122 PortionCutter and the RoboBatcher Flex, intelligently deciding on fillet weights that best match the order requirements.

Instead of cutting all fillets to one ideal average, the concept focuses on assessing individual breast fillets and only cuts what is necessarily needed.

The RoboBatcher Flex is Marel's most advanced fillet batching system, with utmost flexibility and minimised giveaway.

The Marel I-Cut 122 PortionCutter has been designed for high-speed cutting of boneless, non-frozen poultry to fixed weight products.

Full interaction between the I-Cut 122 and the RoboBatcher Flex brings selective cutting in line with specific order requirements. The system is proactive and makes choices based on input, provided in real-time.

The process starts with the given input, the so-called recipes. Each recipe defines one job, responding to a customer's order. Whenever a fillet enters the I-Cut 122, it is scanned, with its weight calculated. This information is sent to the RoboBatcher Flex, which decides the next course of action, based on the recipes provided.

If the fillet, as it is, complies with one of the three recipes, it will pass through without any cutting. Cutting occurs if it is the only way for the fillet to fit into a recipe. In that case, the I-Cut 122 will portion the fillet to the required weight, leaving a valuable "offcut" piece to be used for nuggets or strips. The RoboBatcher Flex finishes the process by accurately batching the different products.

The collaboration between RoboBatcher and I-Cut creates the desired balance between incoming flow and outgoing orders. This dynamic system reduces giveaway to an absolute minimum, while precise cutting ensures that processors achieve high product utilisation with both fillets and offcuts as high value end products.