Attempt Towards Automated Guided System for Cage-free Raising Egg Harvesting

Abstract

Nowadays, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) fetched a remarkable reformation in the agriculture research area. Automatically egg harvesting from poultry farms is still challenging in the present era. Poultry production is switching to cage-free raising. However, the cage-free raising method requires manual harvesting of eggs, which burdens the farmers. The entitled research work demonstrates an Automated guided vehicle capable of harvesting eggs and distinguishing by depending on the color of the eggs and the conditions of the eggs. This study developed an AGV to automatically localize the robot at the harvesting counter and collect eggs using a robotic arm. The robot can move omnidirectionally. A robotics arm has been equipped on the robot body, and its end-effector is designed by three fingers structured. The designed system ensured the safety of the eggs and distinguished the fractured eggs or good eggs. In addition, the robot can distinguish white and brown eggs using machine learning and check whether these eggs have cracked or not. The proposed system is trained by taking several situation images. Bird-view camera information using to localize the robot at the harvesting point. Finally, analyze the mentioned system’s performance, and the system’s egg harvesting rate is 93% on different types of eggs. The introduced mobile robot is easy to operate, and it showed a praiseworthy performance indoor environment. Operating this robot makes it possible to increase the harvesting of the eggs with less labor cost.