• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.232-241
• /
• 2017

This paper presents an automated cow-feeding system based on an AGV and screw conveyor for domestic livestock farms, which are becoming larger and more commercialized. The system includes a hopper module for loading pellet-type mixed feed at the top of the system, a transfer module mounted with a screw conveyor to transfer feed from the hopper module to the outlet module, an outlet module composed of belt conveyors, and an electromagnetic guided driving-type AGV. The weight of the loaded feed is measured by a load cell located under the transfer module. The system reads the feed discharge information stored in RFID tags installed in each cowshed cell, and a predetermined amount of feed is discharged while the AGV is moving. A cow-feed test system was constructed to determine the design parameters of the screw conveyor in the transfer module that determine the feeding capacity. These parameters include the screw's outer diameter, the screw shaft outer diameter, and screw pitch. The parameters were applied to the finalized cow-feed system construction. A DSP-based main controller and cow-feeding algorithm for different scenarios were also developed to control the system. Experimental results confirmed that the system could supply a total of 21 kg of feed uniformly at 420 g/s for a cowshed cell which has 7 cows. The driving distance was 5 m and the speed was 0.1 m/s. Thus, the proposed system could be applied to standardized domestic livestock farms.