BEIJING — In China, robots are being used to inject pigs with vaccines to support intelligent pig farming and meet the production demands of the world’s biggest pork-producing nation.While eating, a pig may not notice the machine approaching from behind before the robot uses a camera to locate the base of the pig’s tail before delivering a needle-free vaccine injection into its buttock.
Vaccination is a routine task, with breeding pigs requiring multiple injections during their production cycles, traditionally making it a labour-intensive aspect of the industry.
Now, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are being combined to create the buttock-tracking robot, which has a success rate of 93.3%, according to Li Bin, a research fellow at the Intelligent Equipment Research Centre of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences.
The robot could support “less-human, automated and intelligent large-scale pig farming”, wrote Li and his team.
The study was published in June in the peer-reviewed journal Transactions of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering.
