Meng Tao had long been leading his team in the research and development of gearboxes and other highly precise industrial machine tools at Kofon Motion Group, a company based in Huanggang, Hubei province.

That was until three years ago, when he started to eye the development of crawfish-processing machines, driven by the growing appetite of crustacean-crazy Chinese diners.

With the aid of artificial intelligence, the machine, developed by Kofon Motion Group, can send the angles and locations of crawfish to robots, and achieve automatic catching. It can remove the heads of about 1,000 crawfish in a minute and keep the tails, and the daily workload of the machine equals to that of 40 to 50 workers.

Kofon said it is at the final stage of testing its self-innovated smart processing machine, and the first such machine nationwide is expected to be put into use in a few months.

Hubei is the source of about half of the country"s crawfish supply, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Now, Hubei has nearly 4,000 crawfish processors, accounting for 23.3 percent of the total nationwide, and crawfish processing has become a pillar industry locally, according to business information provider Tianyancha.