SUMMARY

Many surgical operations and processing of natural product require accurate presentation of the target area in order to achieve more precise incisions. An excellent example is the deboning automation of chicken breast meat, for which the pose of the wing can affect the cut efficiency, fixturing, product quality, and yield. In contrast to engineering objects, biological products present difficulties due to variation in size, shape, and material properties. Unlike past research, which generally found ways to emulate the cutting motion that is used by the workers, this thesis investigates the effects of wing manipulation on incision tasks. The objective of this thesis is to develop an analytical model for characterizing the manipulation for pose presentation of a musculoskeletal structure for a specified incision. The manipulation model consists of joint kinematics and mechanics of bio-materials to determine the joint pose and forces for a given manipulation trajectory. To bound the research, two specific examples are investigated. The first is needle insertion into bio-materials, and the other is the shoulder cutting operation associated with chicken breast meat deboning. The effects of manipulation on needle insertion forces are used to quantify improvements in insertion point accuracy and required insertion force. Force signatures are also developed for insertion into the biomaterials located within the shoulder joint. The shoulder cutting operation requires the development of manipulation and cutting trajectories based on information provided from the model and cutting experimentation. While the experimentation presented in this thesis is developed in the context of poultry processing, which has immediate contributions as a tool to facilitate the design of automated cutting mechanisms in the poultry industry, we expect that the development of the models will find a broad range of applications ranging from general meat processing, to surgical simulation.