King salmon farmer seeks automated end to ‘tedious and costly’ hand-boning
A New Zealand fish farmer has teamed up with a robotics company to develop an automated pin boning system for its king salmon.
Mt Cook Alpine Salmon and Scott Technology have been provided with more than NZ$500,000 by the industry and government-funded group Seafood Innovations for the project, according to a report by Radio New Zealand (RNZ).
The company’s chief executive, David Cole, said it processed about 500,000 king (chinook) salmon a year through its plant.
Time-consuming
But he said it was limited by the time-consuming and costly task of plucking out more than 30 pin bones in every fillet by hand.
“It’s not something you can tackle manually, we couldn’t possibly pin bone every fillet from every fish that we harvest... the size of the team and the frustrations of doing it manually would be overwhelming... so we pin bone only around 20-25% of our harvest at the moment,” he told RNZ.
Cole said automation would allow the company to compete on the same basis as Atlantic salmon producers, who can already pin bone their fish automatically.
Finer bone structure
King salmon have a finer bone structure and technologies developed for automating pin bone removal for Atlantics could not be adapted for king salmon, Cole said.
The pin bone project is expected to take around 18 months to complete.
Cole told RNZ that once the robotic technology was in place, staff who worked on the pin boning line would be re-deployed to “more interesting” parts of the plant.
Bone-out fillets
Brent Keelty, Mt Cook’s processing operations manager, said that “a growing proportion of our market is looking for bone-out fillets and portions”.
He added: “Pin boning is a tedious and costly task and we have to rotate our staff on the pin bone line to avoid repetitive strain injuries.”
He said Mt Cook had visited large equipment manufacturers, but they had no interest in developing an automated solution because the king salmon market was too small to justify the investment.
Scott chief executive Chris Hopkins said the new funding will allow the companies to initially develop hand-held devices.
Then his company “will follow with some more advanced concepts deploying our machine vision technologies to develop a high-resolution 3D view of every fillet and then use algorithms to determine the precise locations of the bones in each fillet. Then the plan is to adapt our robotic automation to remove the bones”.
