A food manufacturing company plans to use industrial robots to automate the production of vacuum-packed retort tray meal for retail business. A retort tray meal consists off cooked rice, meat and vegetables put in a plastic boxed tray. The manual manufacturing process of making the trayt meal starts from cooking the rice in industrial grade rice cooker, meat and vegetables in separate cooking pans. After the food is cooked workers in the kitchen need to assemble the tray meal by putting rice meat and vegetables in the proper positions in the tray for esthetical purpose. The kitchen workers first will scoop the rice from the rice cooker, shape and weigh the rice dough, and finally put the rice in the tray using a utensil. Similar procedures are used to dispense the cooked meat and vegetables to the tray.
For automated tray meal production the layout of the rice plate holding the cooked rice and the transfer line with meal tray.
a) Determine a suitable type of robot manipulators for the rice- dispensing task based on the actions of scooping moving , orienting and dispensing the rice to the designated tray, and state the reason. Note that the end-effector to shape and weigh the rice need not to be considered.
b) Describe the necessary features the robot manipulator needs to have when put in a kitchen environment for food production. Note that the kitchen workers will still be walking around in the kitchen near the robot.