Development of an Animal Farm Robotic Feeding System

Feeding of farm animals is an essential factor for animal growth and productivity. The traditional manual feeding systems of farm animals have been posed with lots of challenges ranging from the high cost of manpower to poor feed management. Existing automatic feeding systems are expensive and are usually fixed systems. This paper presents an autonomous robotic system that collects and delivers feed to farm animals. The system design consists of an automatic feed dispensing system and an unmanned ground robotic vehicle. The vehicle collects feeds from the feed dispensing unit for delivery at the animal pen house in a soft real-time order. An enclosed environment, as is found in many farm animal production settings, is used to enable auto-navigation of the robot system within the farm. Auto-navigation, feed collection and delivery functions are implemented using ultrasonic sensor and infrared (IR) proximity sensors in a microcontroller (Atmega328p) based hardware and firmware control algorithm. Control parameter variation was achieved through Bluetooth (HC-05) interface communication with a mobile device. Experimental test and data collection from the system indicates the system can autonomously supply 26.6kg worth of feed within 1hr at a speed of 1.233km/h and apply to feeding various kinds of farm animals.