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Robots: a Working Breed At the Dairy
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC reports on efforts at Sydney University, where researchers have had excellent success herding dairy cows with robots. By designing the robots to move smoothly, they have kept the cows moving without stressing them. From the video, one can see the animals seem not to interpret the machine as any threat. 'The robot could also cut down the number of accidents involving humans on farms. Most dairy farmers in Australia use quad bikes to round up their cattle and they are one of the leading causes of injury. The team hopes that by using the robot to do the job instead, accident rates could fall.'"
Is it zero? Can we be legitimately concerned about indefinite human unemployment and the long-term phasing out of capitalism yet?
A simple dog is enough for this job, so why??
I can't call that English
What sort of sick freak would drink robot milk?
I do not know where to start. First: typically you do not need to herd dairy cows as "robots" can automatically determine if the cow is ready to be milked, and as such the cows can be trained to come in and get milked themselves. This is called automatic milking, great name huh? Even at an older style establishment the cows usually all line up waiting. Secondly: low stress herding is not news.
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As a kid who grew up on a farm and hated getting my boots stuck in pen muck and bovine shit.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I was looking forward to some good footage of a little robot scooting around a pasture. Instead I got a 6-second clip of a few cows and something zipping around behind them in what appears to be a time-lapse style shot.
What kind of crap journalism is this?
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
This is going no where.
Though Australian shepherds are fantastic, dogs are tough to train and require extensive care. Machines much less so. Except, machines of this robotic nature don't do well in the primitive conditions of a cattle farm.
Farmers have swapped horses fro quad bikes. I don;t see these robots having ANY impact for decades.
Captcha reads "homicide". That's disturbing.
If my choices are buying a robot or an ATV, I think I'd go for the ATV. I mean how much fun can you have with a cow-herding robot?
just a large remote control car. If it does not do its task autonomously it is not a robot.
Man, when that day comes, I'm going to kick back in my tent and eat day two-day-old Food Bank bread all day--just take it easy, you know?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Now I'm an old farm boy and I've had to heard cows a few times. We ran a small dairy operation so I'm pretty familiar with the process. I can tell you that robots are simply not required, nor would they be worth the effort. Cows are only a bit harder to herd than ducks or sheep, but I can tell you that unless you are really stupid you could likely do it in your sleep. I know I did it in my sleep a few times....
Cows will generally move themselves around the twice daily milking route without much input from you. Dairy cows are smart enough to remember what to do and instinctively follow the other cows if they don't know. At milking time, once we got one or two cows trained that they go into that holding pen and walk though that gate to get into the place where you get to eat grain and get milked. It was then eat, drink and repeat for days on end. All we ever really needed to do was to start up the milker and open and close the right gates, even when they where out grazing. They'd usually be waiting at the barn when we got there to milk and if not would come when the milker started up. Sometimes a newer cow would be balky and you'd have to crowd them into the barn, but after a few days they would catch on to the program.
You simply don't need a robot to move cows around. In fact, some of the more productive dairy operations have "self milking". The cows decide when they get milked. They queue up, enter the milking stall and get milked all on their own schedule. It takes a bit of automation (a robot if you like) to get the milker on, but the cows move themselves around.
Now, getting your robot to heard cats... THAT would be something. Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
BBC News Technology: "Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player."
More like "BBC News Technology: Cannot play media. You do not have the correction version of the RealNetworks player."
This is 2013, H.264 VIDEOS CAN PLAY DIRECTLY IN BROWSERS NOW unless you use open-source crap.
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Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
While you do a good job explaining the uselessness of this development for the dairy industry, you also explain how this is a good step in improving robotics and AI toward less uniform tasks. Dairy cow herding is easy, but not uniform, so it makes a viable point of development toward situational aware robot behavior.
On the other hand, this summary does read like an advertisement for an end product instead of an announcement about an advancement in autonomous robotics.
That's old. Here's a current model fully automatic milking robot. The cows aren't pushed around. They're fed tastier food at the milking robot, so they go there willingly. Milk cows need and want to be milked; it relieves pressure. They're herd animals, and will mostly do what the other cows are doing. By exploiting normal cow behavior, the cows do part of the work, and the milking robot does the rest. RFID tags on the cows and tracking computers will detect cows that are having problems.
That's not a prototype or a demo. That's commercial technology. At least three other vendors also produce robotic milking systems.
Then there's the feeding robot the automatic manure removal system, and the barn cleaning robot.
Commercial farms are very heavily mechanized. There are dairy farms with 30,000 cows (enough to provide milk for a major city), but only 400 employees. Farm employment in the US is only 3% of workers. This is why.
Quad bikes are fun ... and most farmers already have at least one.
Very true, but I see this device as more of a proof-of-concept for robots to work beside livestock in general. Pastured dairy cows are usually pretty dosile due to frequent handling, but what about range fed beef cattle? What about a robot to empty a broiler house or load turkey's without spooking them and losing birds due to acities or damaged breast meat? I'm not saying all of this will come to pass, but the possibilities are intriging.
Also, this could potentially be used in conjuction with a robotic milking parlour to automate fetching cows on rotationally grazed pastures to automate the entire process.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
A four-wheeled device, known as Rover, has been tested by a team at a University. It was used to move a group of convicts from a bus to a detention area. Researchers were amazed at how easily the convicts accepted the presence of the robot. They were not fazed by it and the herding process was calm and effective, they said. Robots are already used in the crime control process but the team wanted to see if they could be used in other areas.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I simply cannot see a good reason to automate all of this. With dairy operations you really need to personally interact with the cows on a regular basis. There is no better way to keep in touch with how the cows are doing than to observe them regularly. If you automate everything, you will loose the chance to catch and treat common ailments before the become real problems because you won't be with the cows.
Beef cow operations are the same. You want to be regularly looking at your stock, if not every day, every week for the exact same reason. You need to know that they are doing well, have water, feed etc.
Feeder operations might have a use for robots to handle stock, but I don't think they can afford expensive equipment for this. It's not that hard to not spook cattle that are being moved, if you have the fences and gates arranged correctly. Most feed operations I've seen are built with cattle movement in mind. I'm also going to say that getting a robot to move around a feed lot is going to be a good trick. They are usually pretty sloppy muddy messes that could likely cause trouble for just about any vehicle I can think of.
Oh, and one more thing... We already HAVE automated ways to move cows around in small spaces. I've seen moving gates to crowd them into the right direction which moved on their own. You could call this robot I suppose, but they existed four decades ago.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yes, that was exactly what I was going to post, this herding robot is just a such a stupid idea.
New things are always on the horizon
This isn't useful for massive milk operations. Look at this thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjx0EgXflPM
Sure... they need a person to man that... but its only one person. One guy just putting the milking cups on as the thing spins.
I'd like to see a rotary version of this milking machine. Something where the laser 3d scanner puts the cups on the cow and then shifts it over to the next stall. To be really useful this machine would have to deal with hundreds of cows at once.
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What is it that " Most dairy farmers in Australia" are doing wrong that causes them injuries that may benefit from robots? And why would they do that?
Herding sheep is harder, especially with range sheep. The trick with sheep is to be patient and let them decide that where you want them to go is less scary than trying to run past you. When & where the "leader" sheep go, the rest usually follow. If they're all spun up though...
Plus side, a 200 lb ewe hurts less than a 1200 lb cow when it runs through you. Bad side, it isn't good when said sheep runs through your knee or dislocates your hip or femur... even a 70 lb shetland can hurt you...
Not sure a robot would do better with sheep than a good border collie or two.
AI with optical sensors one day will be able to diagnose illness.
Now, getting your robot to heard cats... THAT would be something. Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
Presumably, that is the point - take a rather boring job that humans have to do, and make it so a robot can do it.
Your inability to see a reason does not mean one does not exist. Although, I don't disagree regarding the daily contact. However, on the farms I've visited that use robots, their direct human contact is not appreciably lower, it is only the type of interaction that has changed.These cows milk themselves so they are not rushed in the parlor by a hired hand trying to get done with their shift or this particular chore faster, which is interaction the cows are probably better off without. Instead the herdsman has time to walk the pens while he and the cows are more relaxed.
These robots also come with all sorts of sensors and automatic flagging software to notify the producer of potential problems. The sensors in these machines can predict mastitis based changes in the composition of the milk before the cow exhibits any signs that the farmer could detect, they can track milk components on a daily basis per cow, and enable targeted feeding of extra nutrition during milking to supplement the TMR for the highest producing cows. For a modern, data driven dairy, these machines are a treasure trove of information about the cows to supplement the knowledge that comes from working with the cows on a daily basis
Also, keep in mind that robotic milkers don't really scale beyond 500 cow herds. These are a labor saving device for those farms that can least afford to hire another person. Each robot can handle about 60 cows depending on how productive they are. Above 500 cows (8 robots) and it becomes more cost effective to use a traditional parlor with full time employees to do the milking.
This robot, which does look more like a graduate student project than a commercial product, appears to work in an open field. That is a very different application from the moving gates you are referring to. Robots are generally built for a specific purpose, and those automated gates you describe wouldn't do much good for cows spread over several acres, whereas this one might in the future.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde