• Journal of Animal Environmental Science
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.105-112
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• 2000

The objective of this study was to determine the teat locations and to develop a teat cup handling system operated by a robot. The results of this study were summarized as follows: 1. The teat cup attaching and detaching operation system developed in this study consists of a control computer, a five-dimensional robot(PERFORMER-MK2), a DC servo gripper, a robot controller, two CCD-cameras (WV-vp410), an image grabber board(DT3153), a model cow, and a teat cup unit. 2. The coordinates of teat locations were measured by a stereo image processing unit. The error ranges of teats coordinates measured were (x, y, z) = (0.83, 1.95, 0.81) mm. When those were transferred into the Robot Coordinate System(RCS) coordinate, the total error ranges measured were x = 0.9 mm, y = 2.0 mm, z = 0.9 mm. 3. The rates of success of teat cup attaching and detaching operation by a robot system were 91.5% on average; the operation time needed were 27.8 sec. Total working hours for the teat cup handling including image processing were 86.1 sec.

• Journal of Animal Environmental Science
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.93-100
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• 2011

This study was conducted to verify the applicability of robot milking system through acquisition and analysis of model teat's position information using scanning range finder (SRF). Model teats, same size and shape as real teats, were designed to analyze the properties according to the material, distance error and angle error of the sensor. In addition, 2-dimensional distance information of each teats was obtained at same time with 4 teat models and the result were as follows. 1. In the case of the fingers on the experiment for selection of materials for teat model, the distance error was from 4.3 mm to 1.3 mm, average was 2.8 mm as a minimum record. In the case of rubber material, average distance error was 4.3 mm. So, this material was considered to be a most suitable model. 2. The distance error was maximum at 100 mm distance. The more distance increased, the less error increased up to 300 mm. Then the error increased after 300 mm and decreased again. 3. The maximum angle error of 10.1 mm was measured at $170^{\circ}$, in case of $70^{\circ}$ the error was 0.2 mm as a minimum value. There was no specific tendency to error of angle. 4. In the 2-dimensional location error for 4 teat models, distance error was 3.8 mm as minimum and 7.2 mm as maximum. The angle error was $1.2^{\circ}$ as maximum. All of errors were included within the accuracy of sensor, the robot milking system was considered to be applicable to measure the distance of teats due to the measuring velocity of SRF and the hole size of teat-cup.