Can Robots Debone a Chicken?

ATLANTA—Robots fly aircraft into war and help doctors perform surgeries. Gary McMurray has spent eight years getting a robot to debone a chicken.

Engineers from Japan to Holland have been trying for decades to create a robot that can replace human workers performing the repetitive task of making precise cuts to remove the valuable breast meat from chickens.

Carving a chicken seems simple enough to people who have done it in the kitchen. But the eye-hand coordination, or reflexive sizing up that the human brain makes as it decides where and how deep to cut has been incredibly difficult to replicate in a robot, says Mr. McMurray, who leads a team of robot builders at the Georgia Institute of Technology.