Technology for the fully automated milking of cows

Abstract

Since dairy farming is a very labour intensive, seven-days-per-week activity, increasing emphasis is being placed on the use of advanced technology in dairying throughout the world. Dairy mechanisation has been well established for many years, whereas dairy automation has only started to gain momentum fairly recently. An important milestone was the introduction of systems for automatic animal identification in the 1970’s. That paved the way for all further dairy automation activities. An analysis of the current status of the fully automated milking of cows shows that the automated attachment of a milking machine’s teat cups to a cow ’s teats is the most important task in dairying that remains to be automated.