A Simulation Model for Cooperative Robotics in Dairy Farms

Clean floors in dairy farms are of vital importance to mitigate risks regarding cow welfare and to avoid ammonia emissions. In modern dairy farms it is common to deploy manure cleaning robots to automate the cleaning task. In the current state-of-the art, robots operate in relative solitude with no coordination or cooperation within the fleet. This paper employs discrete-event simulation to test the effectiveness of different strategies for cooperative, team-based cleaning in dairy farms. Special attention is paid to the impact of various team compositions and robot characteristics on team routing. The results look promising: the minimum cleanliness can be increased by deploying teams while simultaneously reducing the number of cow-robot interactions.