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I've butchered meat before - nowhere near at the level of a professional processor for Tyson, but enough to have the basics down.
You've correctly itemized many of these challenges. Still, when I see the primitive human robots of today and apply our current rate of technological process, these all seem eminently solvable very soon.
Likewise, I will bemoan missing the occasionally overstuffed Taco Bell burrito the blazed-out-of-his-mind fast food worker occasionally serves me. But I'll appreciate that my order will be ready when I get there 100% of the time and the missing flavor of subtle racial animus.
To me the edge cases are going to be home services for a while longer yet, where tight spaces (the ability to suck in your gut) and ingenuity/hacking are going to require that human touch a little longer than food factories.
A humanoid robot is not the right tool for the job though -- what you want is a machine with sharp knives matching the number of joints on a chicken mounted to some kind of press, plus several hooks that can grab the carcass and align it appropriately. (the knives probably need to self-adjust too, depending on the size-consistency of you chickens)
Machine vision probably helps with this some, but as others have said "object segmentation" was a pretty solved problem years ago -- and there's no AI anywhere close to performing at the "I need you to cut this chicken apart at the joints, m'kay" level on the forseeable horizon.
There's a reason why welding bots are not humanoid form -- humans are generalists, bots are not.
We're all speculating here. It's all going to depend on the timing and use cases. But imagine a factory that's sunk millions in capital for their human driven processing.
They can re-do all that with hyper-specialized machines, dozens of vendors, the nightmare of IT/OT interactions (doing a project on this right now in bottling actually). Which they probably do every couple of decades.
Or they can wait for a humanoid robot with these capabilities and drop them almost completely in-place.
Humanoid robots work with existing interfaces. With sufficient image recognition quality and human-like sensory capabilities, they're going to fit in way more jobs. Think of the difference in outlay between training a single humanoid robot to cut chicken legs (which is doable by illiterate illegal immigrants) compared to the expense of developing and deploying a hyper-specialized machine.
This would be more convincing if humanoid robots existed -- or llms were able to control them. If you ask an LLM "how do you break down a chicken?" it will probably give you a pretty good description that a human could follow -- this sort of thing is well represented in its training set. If you ask it for a program to activate the servos of a hypothetical knife-wielding humanoid robot such that a chicken if front of it will be disassembled, it will give you utter trash. (if it doesn't demur)
It's a pretty good example of the difference between an intelligence and language model actually -- a language model can describe things, and AI can do things.
All that to say, if you want your chicken factory automated, waiting for a humanoid robot so you can drop it into place is not a very effective approach. Buying some machines from the Dutch would work much better.
LLMs != AI. Critical here - the models for understanding physical feedback while cutting aren't going to be built from scraping Reddit.
One thing I will concede is that these hyper specialized machines are going to have other physical advantages. A humanoid robot will take up humanoid space. When you compare it to these automated cutting machines elsewhere in the thread, the latter has more throughput than a humanoid interface would at even superhuman speed.
Agreed!
(that means that there is no AI at all though -- and the sheer effort/$ being devoted to LLMs is if anything making it less likely that there will be anytime soon.)
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I’ve done butchery before- you absolutely do not want this. You need a generalist robot at least to start with.
The Dutch company video somebody linked downthread shows it done with rotating knives and alignment guides, not robots at all -- which seems to work, and is not at all generalist.
The approach I'm imagining involves laying the carcass out flat on a cutting board, holding it with the robot hooks, and slicing off limbs based on the location of the joints as determined by AI(tm). Probably another stage for de-breasting is needed -- or the hooks could take another bite or something.
I don't really claim that this would work well; certainly not better than the machine in the video -- but it would work better than some non-existent humanoid robot attached to a non-existent AGI.
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