2001 Volume 63 Issue 2 Pages 109-117
The aim of this study is to develop a milking robot system that satisfies the necessary requirements to attach teat-cups for cows automatically in stanchion stall barns. The prototype system consists of three components, a mobile truck that travels on rails, the cow's body positioning arm from the truck by roller, and the automatic milking unit mounted on one end of the cow's body positioning arm. The teat-cup manipulator is an articulated robot provided with three degrees of freedom in horizontal planes, where an AC servomotor controls each axis. A pneumatic gripper is used for the end-effector to hold the teat cup, and a local sensor with the area, 80mm×66mm, a matrix of 10 infra-red light beams is arranged across the top of the end-effector to detect the teat and allow correction of the robot position to centralize the cup on the teat. For attachment the co-ordinates from the database are used to provide the approximate location for each teat. And then positional commands are sent to the servo drivers at intervals of 20ms via the positioning pulse distributor so that the deviation in less than the set value.
