Musculoskeletal model for analyzing manipulation deformation of an automated poultry-meat deboning system

Automated handling of compliant musculoskeleton has been an area of growing interest due to the needs of processing natural products mechanically. Motivated by the interests to understand the effect of bio-structural deformation on the blade location/force in poultry industry where high yield breast meats are harvested at production speed, a dimension-based method is proposed to characterize bio-structural (bone and soft tissue) deformation when wings are manipulated during processing. This method models the clavicle bone as a compliant beam with breast meat as elastic foundation to derive a closed-form solution to characterize the deformation. The solution has been verified numerically using shooting methods. Analyses show that approximation errors vanish as external loadings increase. Another model has been developed to capture the highly nonlinear characteristics of the soft-tissue. In spite of large variation in force profiles among specimens, the model prediction closely agrees with experimental results. Finally, the musculoskeletal model has been illustratively applied to wing manipulation, which analyzed the effects of size variation on required manipulating force and shoulder deformation. This musculoskeletal model can be potentially used to develop design criteria to automate the process of de-boning chicken breast-meat. While this paper is written in the context of poultry meat de-boning, the method can be used in other bio-tissues, joints, and systems.