Guidelines for designing washdown robots for meat packaging applications

Robots are prominent in several industries where high volumes of products are produced and handled; however, certain food processing industries have been slow to adopt robotic work cells due to the high cost of existing systems, difficulties in handling fresh meat products, and inability for robots to survive a corrosive washdown environment. In this paper, we describe the development of a robot specifically designed to address all of these needs with special attention on testing and validation of that machine. The end result of this is the beginning of a design guideline to assist those involved in the design and operation of washdown robots for the food processing industry.