Hardware News and Headlines

Poultry Processing Robotics Advances with ChicGrasp

Researchers at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station unveiled ChicGrasp, a dual‑jaw robotic gripper that learns to grasp, lift, and hang chicken carcasses by imitating human motions. The system employs a diffusion‑policy imitation‑learning algorithm and camera perception, achieving an 81% success rate on irregular poultry. While the prototype costs about $59,000, its full cycle time of 38 seconds lags far behind a human’s three‑second pick‑and‑hang. All hardware designs, code, and datasets have been released as open‑source benchmarks for agricultural robotics.