Robots get to feel up cows.
October 14th, 2006 by Mr RoboticsLittle known fact: I grew up near a dairy farm. I’ve milked a cow or two. It’s not exactly fun, but it isn’t dreadful either.
Robots are now doing the dirty work on a farm in Pennsylvania, where 10 robots milk 500 cows, who voluntarily walk into the robo-milkers to dump their udders (humans don’t hook up the standard milker. This is 100% automated.)
[The system] reduced the farm’s labor costs by 75% and raised milk production by 15%, says Waybright, president of the farm. He plans to buy 30 more robots to milk the rest of the herd. “Robots don’t get sick, need health insurance, have birthdays, get drunk, and they always show up,” Waybright says.
When a cow enters the milking stall, the robot “recognizes” the cow by a transponder in her collar. Data about the cow, including the last time she was milked and her expected yield, is uploaded to the robot’s Linux-based interface from a database running on a Windows PC. The DeLaval VMS uses a hydraulic arm, two lasers, and an imaging-processing system to detect the cow’s teats, which are sanitized before milking. When done, the equipment automatically detaches. Cows are enticed with a protein snack. “Cows pick up their own rhythm. They’re habit-forming animals and typically adjust to the new process easily,” says Tony Brazda, a DeLaval VMS solutions manager.
Click photo for full story.
This is clearly a big win for anyone who’s ever had to get up at four-effing-thirty in the morning to milk cows. So listen up, you silicon lotharios: You robots can grab as many bovine mammaries as you want. But the homo-sapien mamaries are strictly for us homo-sapiens. You touch even one of the boobies I’ve targeted for squeezeling, and your batteries go bye-bye. Got it?
October 14th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Dairy farms have been automated for ages, with milking machines. But this is a step further with the addition of compuoterized intelligence. Of course, machine+intelligence=robot.
October 15th, 2006 at 12:33 am
So, these kinda robots have been around in Europe for a while, and in Iceland they are a big hit and many farms have one or two of these udder-feeling robots. There is one catch to it though, the farmer has to be avaliable for 24 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks a year because humans don’t trust machines yet (as they should never do totally), where as in the old days a farmer only had to be around 4 hours a day (morning and evening), when the cows are usually milked.
October 15th, 2006 at 2:15 am
Ah, you want the fourth law of robotics, as suggested by the Onion!
http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/opinion/1/
“some parts of the human body are off limits, no matter how much human women plead”
η
October 16th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
That’s crap. Robots do too get drunk. I’ve seen it. Of course, I was also drunk at the time.