© stock.adobe.com/au/pilipphoto
PROCESSING
Automated pin-boning project for
NZ King Salmon Mt Cook Alpine Salmon has partnered with Scott Technology and Seafood Innovations to develop an automated system for removing pin bones from its highly prized King Salmon.
U
nlike the ubiquitous Atlan“It was this set of skills we needed tic Salmon, King Salmon, to tackle a project like this,” said or Chinook, has a finer Keelty. “But we wanted a pragmatic bone structure and there approach that would provide a staged are more than 30 pin bones in every solution along the way to a potentially fillet. Although technologies have fully automated solution.” been developed for automating pin According to Scott Technology bone removal from Atlantics, these CEO Chris Hopkins: “We love a chalsolutions have not proven suitable for lenge like this. It’s ingrained in our pin boning King Salmon. culture, finding interesting ways to New Zealand is the largest producer One of the team at Mt Cook Alpine Salmon’s apply technology solutions to busiof King Salmon in the world, accord- Timaru plant removing pin bones from King ness challenges — particularly to help ing to Brent Keelty, who currently Salmon fillets. fast-growing New Zealand companies manages the processing operations whose products are delivering valuable for around 500,000 fish a year at Mt Cook Alpine Salmon. export revenues for the country.” However, when the company originally visited large equipIn the first instance, an assistive handheld device was ment manufacturers to develop an automated solution for developed by Scott Technology for Mt Cook Alpine Salmon. this species, the volumes were too small to interest them. “We will follow with some more advanced concepts With no alternative available to replace the tedious and deploying our machine vision technologies to develop a costly manual task of plucking out each bone, one by one, high-resolution 3D view of every fillet and then use algoMt Cook Alpine Salmon needed to develop a solution to rithms to determine the precise locations of the bones in meet the growing demand for bone-out fillets and portions each fillet. Then the plan is to adapt our robotic automation of its King Salmon. to remove the bones,” said Hopkins. “A year ago we partnered with Scott Technology to Because of the pioneering nature of the project, Mt Cook research various known technologies around the world Alpine Salmon approached Seafood Innovations Ltd to and to develop a pathway that could provide some level provide financial assistance and was delighted to receive of automated solution to the manual pinboning task,” said more than half a million dollars of backing for the project. Keelty. “It was the ideas and knowledge displayed by Scott The pin-boning project has several milestones and is in this preliminary work that gave us confidence to proceed expected to take another 14 months to complete. with the current project.” This article was republished with permission from Scott. New Zealand-based Scott Technology has expertise in Scott Automation & Robotics Pty Limited imaging technologies and robotics in the food sector. www.scottautomation.com www.foodprocessing.com.au
July/August 2019
31