Cablebot - the cable mounted poultry welfare monitoring robot

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CableBot is a collaborative project between Pondus, Harper Adams University, and Hudson and Sanders to develop an automated AI livestock monitoring system using low-cost cable mounted roaming robots. Its aim is to improve animal health, performance, and behaviour monitoring, provide live environmental control, improve record keeping, and generate management information. It will address the key issue of diminishing labour availability and the challenge of improving animal health and welfare in livestock production systems, by providing live control of, and information about, conditions in animal buildings, reducing the need for staff to visually monitor livestock behaviours and make environmental control adjustments. Whilst the ultimate intention is to monitor all types of livestock, the initial focus will be on broiler poultry.This project will improve the management of intensively raised broiler chickens through behavioural observation, dead bird location, visual weight calculations and drinker and feeder behaviour. This will be performed using camera based algorithms from a cable mounted robot camera platform, thus creating the 'Cablebot'24/7 monitoring of poultry environments is already performed by Hudson and Sanders. With increased data collection and management it is possible to improve early disease detection and therefore potentially reduce mortality, suffering and antimicrobial use. Continued improvement of observations, particularly that of eating and drinking behaviour can improve the feed efficiency of the birds - reducing waste, improving performance and therefore decreasing the environmental impact of the broiler chickens.Pondus, working with H&S and HAU, aims to develop a cost-effective robot mounted camera solution to monitor broiler chicken health, weight and behaviour. The trials will be hosted on H&S managed farms with Pondus creating the visual algorithms and observing selected behaviours and HAU will be creating the cable mounted robot platform.