TERRIFYING TECH: In a bid to make slaughterhouses and other meat processing facilities safer for workers, researchers are looking into ways to combine virtual reality and factory robotics to do some of the work remotely. 

With slaughterhouse staff turnover rates of 100 per cent per year due to poor working conditions and Covid-19 outbreaks, the Agricultural Technology Research Programme (ATRP) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute is investigating how virtual reality and robots can be combined to perform certain “processing operations,” Poultry World reported this week.

The ghastly solution to workers waking up to the horrors of what they’re doing could see robotic arms do tasks like “cone loading” in which dead chickens are placed upside down in cones for “further processing”. Whether this is the same process we see in certain slaughterhouse kill floor footage in which live chickens, turkeys and other poultry are held immobile in cones before having their throats slit is unclear.

Konrad Ahlin, Georgia Tech Research Institute research engineer, told Poultry World that such tasks were harder than they appeared: “The problem is having a dedicated person doing that for extended periods – it’s physically demanding on the person, and it’s a menial, trivial task that’s unfortunately just necessary.”

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Georgia Tech believes its ATRP robotics would overcome problems with previous attempts to automate slaughterhouse processes by allowing human users to control robots and adjust for birds’ irregular and malleable shapes. A provisional patent has been filed and a roadmap for commercialisation is being developed, meaning that the technology may not be too far away.

“There are lots of reasons that this technology could have a big impact on manufacturing, which is struggling with finding people to do jobs,” said Gary McMurry, a Georgia Tech Research Institute principal research engineer, who hailed VR technology as transformative. “With this job you could be sitting in West Virginia, put on a VR headset and work from the comfort of your own home. You’re no longer tied to geography, and that’s really powerful.”

In other words, workers who can’t face working in meat processing plants for a myriad of reasons could one day sit at home with a VR headset on and chop up dead animals from the comfort of their living rooms. With untold thousands of dollars of grant money going into researching this ludicrous technology, at least it confirms that meat factories are a living hell for humans and nonhumans alike.

As such, it isn’t unreasonable to say that research funding would be far more wisely spent on developing plant-based alternatives to animal proteins, as well as cell culture and precision fermentation technologies, where there would be no such issues affecting workers and therefore far lower turnover and investment in training new staff.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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