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Tux Can Even Milk Cows!
GuitarNeophyte writes "If you're a cow, you want to get milked when you want to get milked. And if you were a dairy farmer, you want to make your cow happy. So what do you do? Set up a machine that gives the cow control of its milking schedule. Oh yeah, of course, it runs on Linux. It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go."
Saw it yesterday on a link from linuxdevices (rad site, check it out).
Showed it to my friend who grew up on a cow farm, he was blown away, the video will get slashdotted but I recommend bookmarking and returning some time after to grab the high res video (~ 52 meg) as the accuracy of the teat suckion caps is pretty amazing, laser guided milky goodness.
Basically, cow gets duped into walking into a little pen with tasty food, the machine cleans it's teats, attaches cups with laser guided arm in an impressive display of dexterity, cow gets milked, computer monitors and gets all the stats, suckion caps come off, door on other side of pen opens, cow goes out.
Nothing alpha or beta about it, you could see it going into production straight away. I suspect if the cow started fucking around maybe the system would have trouble, but the back of the pen closes in a little after the cow goes in, so it can't run around. And it's pretty busy chomping on the food they give it to notice.
The biggest decider would be maintenance/support contracts and inital cost I suppose. (anyone track down the cost?)
Other than that, a good example of robotic automation.
Cows actually like to get milked. They don't want to walk around with their udder full. They were doing research with the first generation of robotic milkers when I was doing my Masters at Guelph in the early 90s. Robotic milking is a big win-win. I wish we had these things when I was growing up on the farm. They liberate the farmer from the milking process (at least twice a day), and they provide a much more natural experience for the cow. In the wild, lactating animals don't just feed their young twice a day. The research from the early 90s showed these machines being used on average 6 times a day by each cow, which coincidentally is about the same frequency a cow will nurse her calf. Clearing the udder of milk more frequently typcally increases a cow's milk production by about 10%, a win for the farmer. Less milk in the udder also means a drop in bacterial infections in the udder. Again a win for the farmer (and the cow) who doesn't have to go through the expense and time of treating mastitis.
Coincidentally my parents have exactly this milking system on their farm now, for about half a year. It's really cool to see the thing boot up, see the LILO menu appear and Red Hat Linux booting up.
:-)
Anyway, the cows don't get too much training. One day they're milked the "traditional" way, the next day there's the robot. It takes some time before they get used to that. After about a week already (especially) the younger cows get used to it already. They come 2/3 times a day by themselves, no problem. The problem is mainly with the older cows, they somehow just don't feel like going by themselves. Even now, half a year after we started milking with this robot, we still walk through the barn a couple of times a day to find those cows and make sure they go to the robot.
And even then, they sometimes try to escape from the waiting room to go back to their resting place. Sometimes cows are really naughty.
So I think it doesn't take a long time to make the connection between "that new place" and the actual milking. It just takes an eternity for some cows to actually want to go there.
There's one of these just down the road from my place. A guest lecturer spoke about this to my class. The article didn't go into specifics about how the cow "decides" when to get milked (or at least I didn't see that in my hasty skimming of the article), but the one here works like so: The center of the paddock has the only water trough fenced off, with three gates to it. The cow can only enter through one specific gate. When it does, a scanner reads a tag on the cow's ear, and the computer checks if it's time for the specific cow to be milked again. If so, the exit gate that leads to the milking machine is opened. If not, then the exit gate that leads to the paddock is opened. One of the implications of this is that better quality milk is got from the cows. (This is in Waikato, NZ - if anyone was wondering).