Dairy farmers of the future may sleep safe in the knowledge that an udder-friendly robot is doing the day's milking.
"The idea is to replace farmers' hands and allow cows to milk themselves whenever they fancy," says engineer Bruce Davies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.
Davies' company IceRobotics has just received a £98,000 (US$157,000) grant from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to develop its rubbery manipulator - the 'continuum activator' - into a flexible, teat-seeking robotic arm.
Frequent milking yields more than conventional morning and evening trips to the dairy. And cows produce more when they choose their own milking schedule - often at the times when calves naturally like to feed, between 11 pm and 3 am.
Milking is backbreaking work: in America's dairy state of Wisconsin, for example, it consumes 50 million worker hours each year. "Automated milking is potentially big business," says Albert Meijering of the Research Institute for Animal Husbandry in Lelystad, the Netherlands.
Want to learn more?
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030310/030310-5.html
"The idea is to replace farmers' hands and allow cows to milk themselves whenever they fancy," says engineer Bruce Davies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.
Davies' company IceRobotics has just received a £98,000 (US$157,000) grant from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to develop its rubbery manipulator - the 'continuum activator' - into a flexible, teat-seeking robotic arm.
Frequent milking yields more than conventional morning and evening trips to the dairy. And cows produce more when they choose their own milking schedule - often at the times when calves naturally like to feed, between 11 pm and 3 am.
Milking is backbreaking work: in America's dairy state of Wisconsin, for example, it consumes 50 million worker hours each year. "Automated milking is potentially big business," says Albert Meijering of the Research Institute for Animal Husbandry in Lelystad, the Netherlands.
Want to learn more?
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030310/030310-5.html