Slaughterhouses are dangerous places to work, what with all the tightly packed cutting implements and atomized brain matter you're inhaling. The Jarvis JR-50 Head Dropper aims to make hog processing safer for everyone but the hogs. The name even sounds peaceable.


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The Jarvis Model JR-50 Robotic Hog Head Dropper is a fully-automated porcine decapitation machine capable of processing up to 1200 pigs an hour. After being killed, stuck, and dehaired, hogs arrive at the JR-50's 7 x12-foot stainless steel cage. The six-axis robotic arm uses an industrtial-hardened 3D camera to aim the lopping blade which, with 3750 pounds (1800psi) of cutting force, makes a 9.5-inch incision at the base of the hog's skull, severing it from the spine and trachea.


It then dunks the blade into a hot water dip tank to clean it, then cuts the next hog in line as it travels past. The entire cut-dip-cut process takes about 1.6 seconds. The JR-50's vision controller is even able to account for size discrepancies in the hogs and adjust the height, depth, angle and width of the cut to maximize yields.

You can see some highly creepy video of the process right here. [Jarvis Products Corp]

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