by DonHopkins
4 subcomments
- These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!
Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.
And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.
Here are the videos from the article and some more:
The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zYshsAg1E
Takes Dairy Farm Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZY8TbBoDd0
Zeta - how it works - EN - NL subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17TA-lI_oqQ
Zeta - Vision film - EN - NL subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nRaj16tPLc
Their web site has a pretty cool "page not found" error page too:
https://www.lely.com/moo
Now dairy farms can use two different kinds of AI together! ;) They could develop an insemination module to go with their calving module.
https://www.lely.com/solutions/latest-innovations/zeta/ai-ca...
I wonder if you can rent swarms of these and dispatch them to anywhere you need them:
https://www.lely.com/solutions/manure/discovery-collector/
Or if you can use them in reverse, loading them up them dumping shit wherever you wanted to, like a giant Logo Turdle, in the name of art and science.
- These machines have been around for a while. There are at least nine companies selling them.[1] This started in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have much cheap labor.
There's a competing approach - robotic rotary milking.[2] Rotary milkers (giant turntables with cows on them) have been around for decades, and are becoming more automated, down from four people to one.
All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.
[1] https://roboticsbiz.com/top-9-best-robotic-milking-machines/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxhE53G3CUM
by unclad5968
3 subcomments
- It's cool that this allows the cows to be milked whenever they feel like it. I'd imagine the autonomy actually does improve the cow's quality of life. Also neat that they learned to game the feeding robot. It reminds me of the image recognition experiments they do with birds.
- I don't know the current state of readiness for the milking robots, but 10 years ago it was a nightmare. When a cow got blocked in the robot, the farmer get notify and stops what he is doing to check the cow and the robot. With the free access to the milking robot 24/7 it means that as a farmer you can get your phone ringing to free a cow stuck in the robot at 3 am, or when you are 20 miles away in a field. This level of stress caused many farmers to sell their milking robot and come back to two milking sessions a day, typically 6 am and 6 pm.
by decimalenough
6 subcomments
- China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.
Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.
I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.
(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)
by bombledmonk
2 subcomments
- I toured a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern MN 7 years ago with this exact system.
Laser Guided Teat Seeking Milker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTERLJDKsIw
Automatic Crane feed loading system for the Roomba-like robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDEIcZwQa-o
Reverse Roomba-like automatic feeding robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QFB827U-M
- > And of course there’s manure. A dairy cow produces an average of 68 kilograms of manure a day. All that manure has to be collected and the barn floors regularly cleaned.
Ok that's a stat I didn't expect. 68kg! That's ~150lbs! Holy crap.
by Zufriedenheit
1 subcomments
- Eventually, we will figure out how to turn plants into milk then the cows themselves will be replaced by machines. If you think about it a cow stable is just a huge bioreactor, plants in on one side milk out on the other side.
by stickfigure
3 subcomments
- Super interesting read! But also feels a bit like a paid advertisement. You'd think that an article about robot farms would mention more than one brand of robot? Guessing this is the submarine at work:
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It makes me wonder what the author isn't mentioning. Do they have bugs that take the whole farm down? If the internet goes out, do the machines start acting weird? I'm not a luddite, I love the idea of a robot farm, I just want a complete story.
by AngryData
2 subcomments
- This is neat but definitely seems like something for tiny little dairy farms still. Like they quote 30-40 seconds in the article to hook a cow up to a milker with a robot, but a human can do it in 3-4 seconds and with a rotary milker they can milk near 5,000 cows 3x a day like that . That said it does usually take 3 or 4 people to run a rotary milker, 1 for udder cleaning, 1-2 for attaching milkers, and 1 for post-milk sanitizing. But of course the people working there are generally the most desperate of society because they get shit and pissed on all day and stink even after bathing, so only costs around $10 an hour.
Not saying im not hoping this all improves or that it is good as-is, but the reality is these robots are competing with bottom of the barrel wages from tweakers working at a breakneck pace with live and moving and variable animals so it isn't easy and still has a ways to go before most peoples milk production can be automated.
- Makes me wonder if this is what we'll have to look forward to when there aren't enough youngsters to take care of us in our retirement. (This is meant as a humorous statement...with just a pause to indicate it's not completely humerous.)
by decimalenough
12 subcomments
- Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? The setup in the video looks far more expensive than what most dairies actually do, which is keeping cows tightly confined in stalls where they can't move at all.
- I live near row crops in CA. Every time I read anything like this about automation in agriculture… I can’t help but to think “if you can solve the problem for one row of crops, you can solve the problem for all the rows of crops”
- This guy has been using the Lely feeder robots.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tdzo6cGVqU
He used to spend a lot of time feeding everyday.
- Big respect to the design team thinking of cows as end users
by FrustratedMonky
3 subcomments
- This is one of the future scenarios of how AI deals with its humans. Instead of milking cows, need to keep the humans happy and fed so they mine minerals and build chips.
by gingkoguy
3 subcomments
- How come no one makes fun of agriculture in america ?
If we can successfully produce agricultural products in America why is manufacturing impossible?
- I’m surprised nobody mentioned that we have finally moved beyond the spherical cow approach: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
by your_challenger
1 subcomments
- This is amazing! We need more automation in the world.
But how do they train the cow to stand in line to get milked? Why would a cow patiently wait in line to be milked?
- We use unskilled labour (cows) to perform the necessary chemical reactions to convert grass and water into milk. The milk needs to be pasteurised before it is fit to use and the cows produce a significant amount of manure.
I think we can do better by building vats to perform the same chemical reactions those cows perform.
- whats happening to the cows is gonna happen to people too. thats where we are going folks.
- Vibe Farming ;)
- I thought the title said "hairy" not "dairy" and thought maybe it was a soft robotics thing. Nope
by DonHopkins
1 subcomments
- Now I want a robotic farm management game like a cross between Factorio and SimFarm!
- Pathetic progress without people.
- [flagged]
- [flagged]
Hacker News