Robotics and automation in the food industry: Current and future technologies

The implementation of robotics and automation in the food sector offers great potential for improved safety, quality and profitability by optimizing process monitoring and control. Professor Darwin Caldwell and his team of contributors provide a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies and their applications in different industry sectors in this book. The opening section introduces key technologies and significant areas of development, including automatic process control and robotics in the food industry, sensors for automated quality and safety control, and the development of machine vision. Part one also discusses optical sensors and online spectroscopy, gripper technologies wireless sensor networks (WSN) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and considers intelligent quality control systems based on fuzzy logic. Part two goes on to investigate robotics and automation in particular unit operations and industry sectors. Chapters explain the automation of bulk sorting and control of food chilling and freezing the use of robotics and automation in the processing and packaging of meat, seafood, fresh produce and confectionary, automatic control of batch thermal processing of canned foods and automation for a sustainable food industry.