肉类加工巨头泰森尝试用自动化机器取代人工

Covid-19疫情对价值2,130亿美元的美国肉类行业来说是一场灾难。根据CDC的数据，4月和5月，美国29个州里有17300多名肉禽加工工程的工人感染。4月下旬，工厂的停工使得美国牛肉和猪肉产量减少了三分之一以上。为了应对冠状病毒，肉类工厂花费了数亿美元购买个人防护装备、热扫描仪和工作场所隔断等安全设备，他们还提高了工人的工资，以鼓励他们继续工作。

他们还在寻找一种更长远的解决方案——推进机器人技术的发展，以自动化机器取代人工去骨。美国肉类产品销售额最高的泰森公司的工程师团队正在开发一种自动去骨系统，以处理泰森工厂每周大约3900万只鸡的屠宰、拔毛和切片工作。在过去的三年里，泰森在技术和自动化方面投资了约5亿美元，首席执行官Noel White表示，这些努力可能会在疫情后增加。

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a debacle for the $213 billion U.S. meat industry. In April and May, more than 17,300 meat and poultry processing workers in 29 states were infected and 91 died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Plant shutdowns reduced U.S. beef and pork production by more than one-third in late April. Meatpackers in response spent hundreds of millions of dollars on safety equipment such as personal protective gear, thermal scanners and workplace partitions, and they boosted workers’ pay to encourage them to stay on the job.

They also are searching for a longer-term solution. That quest is playing out in a former truck-maintenance shop near the Springdale, Ark., headquarters of meatpacking giant Tyson Foods Inc. TSN -4.06% There, company engineers and scientists are pushing into robotics, a development the industry has been slow to embrace and has struggled to adopt. The team, including designers who once worked in the auto industry, are developing an automated deboning system destined to handle some of the roughly 39 million chickens slaughtered, plucked and sliced up each week in Tyson plants.  source

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