Flexible assembly of ready-to-eat meals

Today people prefer to spend less time in cooking at home, therefore a clear tendency of increasing the market for ready-to-eat meals is identified. To fit the variety of personal tastes, the shops need to offer larger diversity of meals assortment, therefore the suppliers must adapt quickly to the continuously changing humans' preferences. The existing food industry in most cases is built and based on the concept of mass production on dedicated automatic lines, almost without flexibility of any kind. In average, high volume of low qualification human labour is involved, which sometimes causes hygienic or social problems. As generally the price of food products is low, even a big production volume is unable to create enough investments for advanced manufacturing lines. The obvious conclusion is that the most appropriate approach to solve the above problems is to populate the food industry with larger number of flexible production lines (cells) provided with higher level of intelligence. This licentiate is focused on the particular technology of preparing ready-to eat meals. Specifically, we defined the goal to develop a concept of flexible assembly cell, which is expected to have new and advanced capacities, such as to be easily adapted to the variety of the types and the volume of produced meals, to be easily maintained and setup for operation by low-level qualified operators, to exclude human labour and meet the strict hygienic norms. Last but not least, such cell should be attractive for numerous factories and companies. The first aspect of our work is the development of a consistent concept for flexible assembly of ready-to-eat meals. The main idea was to build a human-free system, meaning that human's participation in the entire manufacturing process should be avoided or highly reduced. We represent a continuous technology performing the chain CAD-CAM-CAPP-production with minimum involvement of human, who is needed only at the CAD phase to specify and verify the content and arrangement of the meal. Expert knowledge is used in the CAPP stage to create an optimized assembly plan and the entire process is guided by a vision system providing visual-servoing of ABB's IRB-340 FlexPicker robot manipulator in our laboratory setup. The second aspect of the work is the development of reliable technical solutions for grasping and manipulation of food ingredients within the flexible assembly cell. Knowledge about physical and mechanical properties of the components is derived from a study of available products on …

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