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.
“Current pig vaccination still relies largely on human workers, creating problems including broken needles, missed injections and inaccurate placement,” Li wrote.
