Author：Yi-Hsin Yeh, Rou-Yi Su, Szu-Han Wang,Hsinchu Branch, Livestock Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan.

In order to ensure the competitiveness of the sustainable development of the dairy industry and to maintain the self-sufficiency rate and market share, the dairy farm in Taiwan is introduced into the operations of automatic milking robots. This program introduced the robot to replace the need for a high degree of labor burden of routine technical or labor services. Automatic milking and feeding robots will be used effectively to improve the performance of dairy cattle and to improve the dairy industry's capacity and quality.

There were two exhibition farms to show how to use automatic milking robots located at Tainan and Hsinchu in Taiwan. Automatic milking robots identify cows with infrared light positioning and a 3D camera that not only can track cows quickly, also detect the component of milk, milk temperature, milk yield, and timely weights of each cow. This robot combines automatic feeding of concentrate while milking. This service operates for 24 hours, dairy cows can be milked by their will. Depending on the farm design, using free-flow traffic is not only about the cow’s freedom to choose when to eat, drink, rest, or be milked but also highly related to the cow’s well-being and degree of comfort during milking. From 2015 to 2021, there were 20 milking robots in Taiwan, the average milking frequency was 2.9 times per day. Using a milking robot can increase 10-15% milk yield while saving 14 work hours per day and this adds to 3 million NT dollars per farm per year. With the milking robots, farmers finally have a chance to spend more time with families and farm management.