Passive Shackling

About

Background: Food processing is one of Georgia’s leading industrial sectors, and one of the largest industrial employers in Georgia. The industry and the agriculture are a big part of the Georgia economy (the leading producer of chicken in the United States). Georgia is the third largest poultry producer in the world. Poultry processing is highly mechanized, and produces 24.6 million pounds of chicken every day. Robots have been used in systems that require repetitive processes, as they can be designed to perform such repetitive steps continuously, almost without fail, with extreme precision and at high speed. However, robots have not yet been fully adapted for handling non-rigid materials, such a birds. Therefore, today’s poultry companies are not looking to robotic systems as potential solutions for shackle loading systems, as they are shown to be too complicated a solution for this industry, and perhaps even ultimately unsuccessful. The present invention is directed to a simple, passive system of moving poultry products of unknown position and orientation from a moving conveyor belt to a cone or shackle line.