Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) is currently driving an extensive $AU60 million program of advanced 2D and 3D imaging technologies, encompassing the full ‘paddock to plate’ red meat value chain. MLA has key strategic partnerships with leading domestic and global technology provider organisations, for example: hyperspectral imaging (US), dual energy xray (NZ), airline baggage CT (US), including both 2D and 3D modalities.

The imaging technologies are being developed for application: on-farm for livestock and pasture management with autonomous vehicles, in processing plants for livestock scanning for health diagnosis, in-plant for carcass robotic between-bone cutting lines, in-plant for robotic separation of meat from bones ‘robotic surgery’, and in-plant for robotic meat cut recognition with pick and packing into export cartons. Each has the objective of increasing value chain production and labour efficiencies.

MLA views the key opportunities of vision-assisted robotics as: the use of on-farm autonomous devices to conduct arduous or repetitive or time-consuming tasks, adding value to meat products through precise cutting and delivering high value-added products to selected markets, providing valuable process and product data to the value chain, and the ability to re-allocate valuable labour from arduous and repetitive processing tasks to value adding complex activities more suited to people.