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Design of a Vision-Based Sensor for Autonomous Pig House Cleaning

Abstract

Current pig house cleaning procedures are hazardous to the health of farm workers, and yet necessary if the spread of disease between batches of animals is to be satisfactorily controlled. Autonomous cleaning using robot technology offers salient benefits. This paper addresses the feasibility of designing a vision-based system to locate dirty areas and subsequently direct a cleaning robot to remove dirt. Novel results include the characterisation of the spectral properties of real surfaces and dirt in a pig house and the design of illumination to obtain discrimination of clean from dirty areas with a low probability of misclassification. A Bayesian discriminator is shown to be efficient in this context and implementation of a prototype tool demonstrates the feasibility of designing a low-cost vision-based sensor for autonomous cleaning.

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Correspondence to Ian Braithwaite.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Braithwaite, I., Blanke, M., Zhang, GQ. et al. Design of a Vision-Based Sensor for Autonomous Pig House Cleaning. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2005, 473479 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2005

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2005

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