Chicken Boy Robots

Farm Automation and the Robotics SL or Faromatics are the developer of the award-winning poultry monitoring robot, which is termed Chicken Boy Robot, based in Barcelona, Span, born out of the European Union, that gets funded in the research project. Five years after its development, the global agricultural machinery giant, AGCO, acquired this company.

ChickenBoy is the globally-reckoned first ceiling-suspended poultry monitoring robot that assists farmers in enhancing farm productivity and animal welfare. The rail is a mounted robot using an entire set of sensors to measure the poultry housing’s thermal sensations, light, air quality, and sound.

It even uses AI or artificial intelligence to identify the risks to the health and welfare of the broiler chicken and farm equipment. The vets, farmers, and stock persons interact with ChickenBoty through mobile notifications or the own cloud platforms of Faromatics.

Overview of ChickenBoy

After 18 months of highly intensive work, they launched their ChickenBoy today, the globally reckoned roof-suspended robotics observing chicken, equipment, and litter autonomously daily. The patent-pending robot monitors the quality, health, and welfare of the air while inspecting the equipment operations informing the farmers, vets, or the stock person through mobile notifications.

ChickenBoy Robot spends its days with the chicken while offering their farmers through their secured cloud platform, including audio access, direct videos, and the data collected through the robot.

Users can even subscribe to customize the alarms sent to mobiles and other devices.

It is the robot that helps these farmers at enhancing the animal welfare and the living conditions of the chickens. It will help in the proper management of their digestion, equipment, litter, and climate better. At the same time, artificial intelligence identifies the onset of illnesses, broken drinkers, and deceased birds make their life better for these chickens, and saves the farmers money.

Understanding A Robot

Robotics, or the engineering of the technology and science of the robots, involves the robots’ design, manufacturing, and application. These machines perform repetitive tasks with a couple of degrees of automation. These robots are being used across different industrial circumstances to relieve human physical and mental efforts while enhancing their production efficiencies. These are the robots that even work under situations that can become dangerous for humans.

The perfect instance for this robotic process in the modern cage egg industry is the integrated conveyor belts for collecting and transporting the eggs into the picking room. These conveyor belts would hence remove the need for tacking these eggs, which are highly relevant in modern sheds with their tiered cages. This collection of eggs through the conveyor belt even reduces the risks linked with the eggs being collected manually at heights and under lower lighting levels. While the ChickenBoy robot constantly monitors the chicken and their movements.

The Future

[Image source: Faromatics]
The primary challenge in the poultry industry is recognizing the type of elements of the production system monitored and controlled by the robots and which is the correct type of technology involved in achieving enhanced efficiencies. Whenever technology is not available, it might have to get developed. The other step would be to test whether this or the identical technology can extend to monitoring the birds’ health and welfare.

The prime question is the type of parameters that get measured reliably, informing us about the internal health of the animals, wealth, and production of the states. Following this, there is a high likelihood of the challenges present around the capability of computers. Coping with significant data input is complex, mainly when the monitoring system offers a continuous stream of real-time information.

Robots probably won’t be able to keep an eye on every bird, so sentinel birds need to be the centre of attention. Identifying and tracking certain birds, particularly in low light conditions, and the problems with lack of contrast between the subject and backdrop are only a few of the numerous technological concerns related to this problem that needs to be solved. For long-term use, increased battery performance will be necessary if remote-sensing transponder devices are to be attached to sentinel birds. Last but not least, if welfare organizations desire to raise the stock person-to-bird ratio, would they tolerate the usage of robots?

Advancement of Robotics In The Poultry Industry

Semi-automated to completely automatic robots are possible. The gathering of eggs using a conveyor belt system illustrates a semi-automatic method. Although the robot doesn’t decide how it should behave, the system may automatically count the number of eggs that pass a certain point.

There have been a couple of technological advancements in recent years leading to the development of several robots like the ChickenBoy robot. Several agricultural robotic advancements use machine vision technology to avoid risks, identify crops, and determine whether they are prepared for harvesting. Computer or machine vision generally involves the camera or multiple cameras feeding the right information to the robot, allowing it to access and locate the crops surrounding it. Machine vision will make it highly likable for the robots to start performing tasks like growth monitoring, harvesting, weed picking, and more.

Many agricultural robot advancements have also been made feasible by satellite navigation systems like GPS. GPS data is frequently used by robotic agricultural equipment to position and locate themselves on farms. Robotic plowing vehicles may employ a mix of computer vision sensors and GPS to navigate and drive themselves, whether plowing, planting, or traversing a field.

Autonomous cars may learn to adapt and avoid new or unforeseen risks in their courses using machine learning, which offers an enhanced approach to recognizing collision paths. The optimum techniques for job identification and correct execution may also be developed by picking and quality control robots as they go along.

Conclusion
Innovations are the key component across any sector and are primarily highly relevant in agriculture more than before. Inviting the latest technologies like machine learning, robotics, and computer vision is the main factor in the transforming face of agriculture globally. It even reshapes the definition of the farmworkers reducing their workload and showing promising results in farming efficiencies.

The ChickenBoy Robot is here to stay while the investors are more focused on the sustainability of the economy through robotics, automation, modern greenhouse practices, vertical farming, and more.

Robotics‘ use in the poultry sector is developing quickly. Robotics has helped increase manufacturing efficiency, especially in lowering labor expenses per bird. The majority of poultry businesses are intensive, thus the sector is well-suited to continue to gain from the adoption of robots.

By Robots Science

Robots Science brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the world of robotics and artificial intelligence. With a keen interest in the latest trends and developments in this field, We are committed to providing readers with insightful and informative content that helps them stay up-to-date on the latest advancements in robotics and AI.