Nvidia shows how surprisingly hard it is for a robot to pick up a chicken wing

Nvidia

It's football playoff season in America -- a time when it's all too easy to pick up and chow down on a chicken wing without much thought. It turns out, however, that the robot that helped prepare your chicken had to put in a great deal of effort to pick up that piece of meat. 

Nvidia on Thursday showcased how the Massachusetts-based startup Soft Robotics is deploying its technology -- including on-site GPUs and the Isaac Sim robotics simulation toolkit -- to make it easier to deploy robots designed to handle foods like chicken wings. 

Also: Nvidia's robot simulator now includes human characters too

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Food processing and packaging plants may seem like an obvious place to deploy robots. Foods like chicken wings are quickly moved across conveyor belts as they're uniformly cooked and prepared for consumption. Meanwhile, employers like meat-packing companies are having a difficult time filling jobs that come with increased health and injury risks. 

Even so, the food industry has been relatively slow to adopt robotic tools. Gripping unusually-shaped objects has long been a major challenge for robots. On top of that, something like a piece of chicken can be slippery and shiny, making it even harder to grab. And if a robot drops a food item or knocks it to the floor, it goes to waste. 

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