Robots in Poultry Farming

Modern poultry farming has become very intensive nature and the farmer of poultry are learning and applying data science knowledge on their farms Farmers have to monitor their birds health status on daily basis and proper farm activities to get maximum production (George, 2024).

Further, modern technology have paved the way for farmers as this emerging data science is time and labor saving. In today’s scenario it is also difficult for farmers to find consistent labor to fill these jobs. To address these issues, poultry industry is rapidly adopting modern automation.

Fig: Robotic automation advancing precision and efficiency in modern poultry farming.

Application of mobile robots in intensive poultry production system is gaining momentum due to their many remarkable features. The Georgia Tech Research Institute’s scientist have recently developed a prototype mobile robot system for operation in intensive poultry houses. This mobile robot may perform daily monitoring tasks while safely interacting with chickens in commercial chicken houses.

The robots uses a commercially available chassis, with custom developed software to handle localization, navigation, and interaction. These practices were established to permit the mobile robot to navigate in and among a flock of live chickens and to carry out monitoring and some utility tasks. In addition, mobile robot system have capacity to execute various farm operations associated with poultry house (Vroegindeweij et al.,2024). For example, mobile robots clean, collect egg, analyze image and can monitor house equipment conditions.

The researchers have also checked mobile robots autonomy and navigation capabilities in 20 hours field trials and concluded that robots can assemble environmental factors data, safely move among birds, and monitor flock behavior without distressing the birds. Moreover, scientists also tested activities such as movement patterns, obstacle avoidance, and data accuracy under different housing conditions.

The research team also considered the capability of robot to successfully navigate the house while ensuring beneficial effect on the animal welfare. These validation tests successfully proved that the prototype system can achieve the desired goal of navigating in a chicken house environment.

REFRENCES

George AS,. Humanoid robots as poultry partners: enhancing welfare through collaboration on the farm. Partners Universal International Research Journal. 2024 Mar 25;3(1):183-99.

Vroegindeweij BA, Blaauw SK, IJsselmuiden JM, van Henten EJ. Evaluation of the performance of PoultryBot, an autonomous mobile robotic platform for poultry houses. Biosystems engineering. 2018 Oct 1;174:295-315.