Robotization and intelligent digital systems in the meat cutting industry: From the perspectives of robotic cutting, perception, and digital development

Meat, as protein-rich food, provides essential nutrition to humans. Meat consumption is expected to increase by 15% over the next decade, requiring the meat industry to boost its capacity. However, the meat cutting industry's harsh working environment and long-term heavy workload result in a labor shortage. Low-margin and low capacity require innovative processing methods. Hence, some novel automation methods are urgently demanded to meet these challenges. Accompanied by the development of Industry 4.0, robotization and intelligent systems are progressively applied in the meat cutting industry, which can provide a flexible, adaptive, and sustainable processing approach. The paper selected 50 papers using the systematic literature review method. This paper provides an overview of the current research and commercial applications of cutting robotization from livestock, poultry, and fish in the meat industry. Additionally, intelligent sensing technologies, advanced cutting techniques, and a novel manufacturing concept called the meat factory cell, are emphasized to promote efficiency, scalability, and modularization. Finally, we discuss the potential applications of digital technologies in the meat cutting industry and the focal points of future research aiming to promote cutting robotization. The meat cutting process can be highly robotized by integrating dexterous cutting robots, advanced sensing techniques, and digital systems, driving the transformation from manual labor to robotic, efficient, and intelligent manufacturing. Consequently, robotization and intelligent digital systems can provide a brand-new manufacturing method to the meat cutting industry and advance the Meat factory 4.0.