Mayekawa, a Japanese robotics company, has produced an amazing pork thigh deboning robot. While skilled butchers can debone around 50 hams an hour, the HAMDAS-R can debone over 500.

Although robots have been used to butcher meat before, there was always a problem of waste due to the fact that meat comes in different sizes, which made waste an issue. But through the use of x-rays, the robot is able to detect the shape of each joint and find eight markers on the meat and from those points is able to determine where the cuts should be.

The robot is basically a very sharp knife on the end of a maneuverable robotic arm. It has springs on both sides of the blade that mimic the suppleness of human wrist movement. The springs let the knife more closely follow the contours of the bone and the ‘grain’ of the meat, to increase overall efficiency.