As any home cook knows, manually filleting a fish can be an arduous task. It’s a time-consuming process that offers no guarantee of success. At the end of the day, there is likely going to be a small bone or two left behind. Some valuable meat is also bound to go to waste. On a national scale, these intricacies present a large-scale problem.
The fish industry plays a vital role in Nordic economies. Due to higher salaries in these countries, however, the processing of wild-caught fish is often carried out in Asia and Eastern Europe, before the fish is returned to Scandinavia for sale. While farmed fish are suited for automated machine filleting due to a similarity in size and shape, the variability in of wild-caught fish has always remained a manual process…until now.
Founded in 2012, the APRICOT project has developed a machine that might solve many of these problems. Its new robot uses x-ray technology to locate fish’s pin-bones and quickly and precisely trim them away using water-jets. A prototype is ready for testing, with hopes that it could be working by next year. Along with the guarantee of boneless fillets and less waste, the machine’s implementation would create knowledge-based jobs and keep fish processing jobs local (these jobs have decreased drastically in recent years, despite Norway being the world’s second largest exporter of fish).
Take a look at the video below to see just how the machine works. We already have visions of one occupying a corner of our office kitchen.
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