Professor of School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment, Western Sydney University, Australia. His research interests cover Industry 4.0, Additive Manufacturing, Advanced Engineering Materials and Structures (Metals and Composites), Multi-scale Modelling of Materials and Structures, Metal Forming and Metal Surface Treatment.
2024-04-30
2024-02-24
2024-01-04
Manuscript received February 20, 2023; revised April 4, 2023; accepted May 11, 2023.
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. Keywords—egg harvesting robot, AGV, mecanum vehicle, three finger end-effector Cite: Rubel Ahmed, Takahashi Kei, Wumenjiang Abudoula, Tasuku Miyoshi, Nobuya Tanimoto, and Kazuaki Oozeki, "Attempt Towards Automated Guided System for Cage-free Raising Egg Harvesting," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 216-222, July 2023. Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
