As a chicken farmer, you spend as much as an hour or more every day collecting 'stray' eggs; the eggs that end up in the straw on the ground for whatever reason. The result is not only loss of time but also costs. Bastiaan Vroegindeweij, son of a chicken farmer, therefore developed an egg-picking robot.
The so-called PoultryBot should take the poultry farmer's heavy egg-harvesting work off their hands. The idea for the robot originated some 10 years ago, when Vroegindeweij participated in a robot competition as a student at Wageningen University. Together with others, he worked on a robot that drove between maize plants to do something about weeds. In the test phase, the weeds were in the shape of yellow golf balls, which can, of course, be picked up. Then someone came up with the idea of collecting eggs then. Vroegindeweij took it further and focused his graduation and PhD research at Wageningen University on the egg-picking robot. In late 2015, the PoultryBot was presented to the public.
Complex environment
Meanwhile, Vroegindeweij is working with his company Livestock Robotics to further develop the robot. "The biggest challenge during development was the complex environment we had to deal with. A large proportion of robots generally work in a structured environment. With industrial robot arms, there is often even a fence around them. On a poultry farm, there is not so much structure; chickens do as they please, there are metal structures everywhere, the floor is not flat and light conditions are far from optimal. So it took some puzzling to make sure the technology would work in this environment too."
It finally succeeded; the red trolley with a kind of spiral in front that collects the eggs drives smoothly between the hens. "The robot's brain is by far the most important part; that determines its route, how it gets through everything safely, how it gets to the eggs. We looked at what already existed for that and started testing that for our own application. The route planning was a challenge; these really only exist in the form of TomTom navigation and in a coverage version, where an entire area is searched. In the PoultryBot, we merged the two. It searches the whole area but comes back to the places where there are a lot of eggs."
To the market
A unique robot, especially for the poultry industry. According to Vroegindeweij, there is therefore plenty of interest, but there are no concrete customers yet. For that, the necessary financial steps are also still needed. "The red PoultryBot we deployed at my father's place is a proof of concept. It can drive and collect eggs but when the battery runs out, it stops. There are also other details I want to work on before I seriously take it to market." But potential is definitely there for the PoultryBot. "This robot can not only be used for egg collection but can also, for example, monitor the climate in the house and detect sick animals. The concept can also be used in other places, such as for cleaning up litter in the city."
Source Article from www.livestockrobotics.nl
