Poultry Processing Robotics Advances With ChicGrasp
April 1, 2026 | 1 min to read
Amirreza Davar, left, a mechanical engineering graduate student in the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, worked with Dongyi Wang, an assistant professor in the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Food Science, to develop ChicGrasp as part of $1 million grant project supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. (Photo Credit: University of Arkansas)
What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens.
Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing.
To learn more, please visit University of Arkansas.