[HN Gopher] How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers
        
       Author : DonHopkins
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2025-04-15 22:26 UTC (33 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
        
       | DonHopkins wrote:
       | 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
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | Pretty primitive stuff compared to SOTA
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ
        
       | unclad5968 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | DonHopkins wrote:
         | And how they had to inhibit greedy cows with the munchies from
         | volunteering to be milked too often, just to get treats!
         | 
         | There are certain things you just can't predict, and have to
         | learn in the field...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-04-15 23:00 UTC)