Design And Experiment Of Posture-adjustable Pushing Robot For Cattle And Sheep

With the rapid development of cattle and sheep breeding in our country,the technology of cattle and sheep breeding has become centralization and scale.The breeding farms began to adopt the complete mixed ration feeding technology,which can ensure the uniformity of feeding in cattle and sheep.However,in feeding process cows and sheep will be fed out of the feeding areas leading to feed waste.At present,the existing pushing robots in China have a fixed pushing height.Some of the pushing robots change their attitude by lifting the whole pushing device,which is easy to cause loss due to excessive friction and difficult to clean the feed in the ground.To solve this problem,combining with the current situation of aquaculture farms in our country,this paper developed an attitude adjustable automatic pushing robot of cattle and sheep,which could realize ultrasonic navigation,pushing attitude adjustment and rotating cylinder pushing,improving the intelligent level of aquaculture farms.The main contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)According to the actual situation of domestic farms and production process requirements,the whole machine structure of cattle and sheep breeding pusher robot is determined,which is mainly composed of walking mechanism,rotary pusher mechanism,attitude adjustment mechanism,battery,navigation control system and pusher rotary cylinder.The key parameters of each robot mechanism were designed and calculated.A three-degree-of-freedom parallel attitude adjusting mechanism was designed.The key parameters were calculated and determined by inverse solution method.(2)The navigation control system of the pusher robot is designed and the control algorithm of the pusher robot is determined.The hardware design of the robot control system,the design of the peripheral circuit of the single chip microcomputer and the serial communication module,and the selection of the important modules such as the ultrasonic ranging sensor.The robot control system of magnetic stripe tracking navigation,ultrasonic ranging navigation and attitude adjustment of the pusher robot is designed.The robot is guided by the magnetic stripe to carry out the transition work between different working areas.In the cowshed,the robot is guided to push materials by ultrasonic navigation.Through the attitude adjustment system,the robot can change its attitude to meet the needs of walking and pushing.(3)The dynamic simulation analysis of the three-degree-of-freedom attitude adjustment mechanism was carried out,and the discrete element simulation analysis of the pushing process was carried out.The simulation analysis of the attitude adjustment mechanism shows that the load of the electric pusher rod and the tilt Angle of the pusher barrel meet the design requirements under the design scheme of the attitude adjustment mechanism.Single factor simulation experiment and orthogonal experiment were carried out respectively by using EDEM.Through the analysis of single factor experiment,it is concluded that with the increase of robot forward speed,the feed pushing rate decreases and the feed pushing work increases gradually.With the increase of rotary speed,the feed pushing rate increases and the work of pushing decreases.With the increase of the design Angle of the rotary drum,the feed pushing rate had no obvious change,and the work of pushing showed a downward trend.After range and variance analysis of orthogonal experiments,the optimal robot design scheme is determined as follows: forward speed of 9 m/min,rotating cylinder speed of 4.5r /min,and design Angle of rotating cylinder of 10°.(4)The trial production and test of the pusher robot are carried out.The test results show that the optimal operating parameters of the prototype are the forward speed of 9 m/min,the rotating speed of 4.5r /min,the design Angle of the rotating cylinder of 10° and the width of the silage of 0.5 m.After the prototype is pushed,there is no large area of feed missing on the road surface,and the road surface is clean,and the robot can pass the slope of 15°.Finally,the tilt Angle of the pushing cylinder under the two pushing states is 5.02° and 4.47° respectively,the pushing rate is 98.79%,and the average working duration of the robot is 16.28 h,which meets the requirements.