Food Manipulation

Description

We will realize robotic food manipulation. To that end, we will conduct research on soft grippers for food handling, sensors for food handling, and measurement and modeling of food properties.

In Japan, several millions of lunch boxes are manufactured and sold per day. Currently, packing of food materials to lunch boxes is performed by human hands. Lunch box must be manufactured near the consumption area. However, due to labor shortage in recent years, automatic packing is strongly required. There is a strong demand for automatic packing of confectionery boxes and the sorting of agricultural and marine products with the recent shortage of human resources.

The reason why food handling is difficult is that many foods are soft, and the shape and properties of food materials vary much. One solution to cope to successfully perform handling despite of such variations is to introduce flexible materials such as elastomers and fibers into robot hands. In other words, by using a soft materials for the physical interface between robotic hands and food materials, robotic hands will be able to absorb such variations in shape and properties.

shell gripper	wrapping gripper	vision for food handling	binding hand
printable hand	prestretched hand	food property sensing

SIP demonstration room

Budget

• Cross-Ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) second phase / Intelligent Knowledge Processing Infrastructure Integrating Physical and Virtual Domains "Sensor-Rich Soft End-Effectors for Cyber-Physical Systems" 2019 - 2023

Notes

• Workshop on Robotic Food Manipulation at IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

• 2019 Non-destructive measurement of food material viscoelasticity
• 2018 Food Material Handling by Printable Soft Hands and Pre-stretched Soft Hands
• 2017 Soft Robotic Hands for Food Material Handling
• 2016 Lightweight Robotic Hands for Food Material Handling
• 2014 Handling of Food Materials by Lightweight Robot System
• 2013 Robotic Handling of Rheological Food Objects
• 2012 Identification of Rheological Deformation of Food Object
• 2011 Simulation and Property Identification of Rheological Object Deformation
• 2010 Simulation and Identification of Rheological Object
• 2009 Simulation and Identification of Rheological Object
• 2008 Simulation and Identification of Rheological Object

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