How Your Bacon Is Made: The Jarvis JR-50 Super Pig Decapitator

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Slaughterhouses are dangerous places to work, what with all the tightly packed cutting implements and atomized brain matter you're inhaling. The Jarvis JR-50 Head Dropper aims to make hog processing safer for everyone but the hogs. The name even sounds peaceable.

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The Jarvis Model JR-50 Robotic Hog Head Dropper is a fully-automated porcine decapitation machine capable of processing up to 1200 pigs an hour. After being killed, stuck, and dehaired, hogs arrive at the JR-50's 7 x12-foot stainless steel cage. The six-axis robotic arm uses an industrtial-hardened 3D camera to aim the lopping blade which, with 3750 pounds (1800psi) of cutting force, makes a 9.5-inch incision at the base of the hog's skull, severing it from the spine and trachea.

It then dunks the blade into a hot water dip tank to clean it, then cuts the next hog in line as it travels past. The entire cut-dip-cut process takes about 1.6 seconds. The JR-50's vision controller is even able to account for size discrepancies in the hogs and adjust the height, depth, angle and width of the cut to maximize yields.

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You can see some highly creepy video of the process right here. [Jarvis Products Corp]

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