Author：Chih-Wei Chen / Senior Technical Specialist, Livestock Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan
Author：Wan-Ling Tsai / Assistant, Livestock Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan

Chicken Herding Robots set off a craze for robotics adoption in the poultry industry. In response to this development, the Council of Agriculture requested Professor Cheng of National Ilan University's Department of Biomechatronic Engineering to continue development in this field. In 2020, additional functions such as robot positioning system optimization, environment sensors, camera sensors, and data collection were implemented. Also, Professor Cheng invited the biomechatronic engineering departments of National Chung Hsing University and National Taiwan University to build a team to develop robots for poultry farms. Together, they created robots to retrieve dead and diseased chickens as well as eggs, or robots to clean and disinfect chicken farms, thereby forming a robotic brigade in response to the looming economic threat of imported chickens.

When raising chickens, it's important to pay attention to environmental conditions as well as monitor the health of the chickens. The robots should not patrol poultry farms on a 24-hour basis as this would disturb the chickens’ sleep schedules. While the Intelligent Closed Poultry Farm Feeding and Management System provides all-day monitoring of poultry activity, chicken farmers cannot watch surveillance monitors at all times. Consequently, the research team compiled knowledge from poultry experts and veterinarians and applied AI machine learning, image processing, and voice print recognition technologies to build an integrated system that combines an environment monitoring database that automatically captures changes in the characteristics and appearance of chicken behavior. The system provides 24-hour chicken monitoring to check for inverted combs, limping, or raspy sounds; this is combined with a digital service expert chatbot that offers functions such as project management for raising poultry, historical data query, real-time environment monitoring, and online consultations. Chicken farmers are able to stay on top of conditions in their poultry houses, perform instant remote contact with experienced managers or poultry and veterinarian experts to quickly address sudden health conditions that occur in their chickens.