Sheep shearing by robots―an update

Australia's robotic sheep-shearing projects have been faced with difficulty in light of a major downturn in the country's wool industry. The research team at the University of Western Australia is intact, despite budget and staff reductions, and the Australian Wool Corp. is still determine...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Industrial robot 1992, Vol.19 (1), p.23-24
Main Author: TREVELYAN, J. P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal productions
Animals
Automation
Biological and medical sciences
Case studies
Colleges & universities
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Improvements
Production increases
R&D
Research & development
Robots
Sheep
Terrestrial animal productions
Vertebrates
Wool
Wool industry
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Summary:Australia's robotic sheep-shearing projects have been faced with difficulty in light of a major downturn in the country's wool industry. The research team at the University of Western Australia is intact, despite budget and staff reductions, and the Australian Wool Corp. is still determined to proceed with commercialization. In 1989, for the first time, sheep were completely shorn in a fully automatic process by the team at the university. A major achievement in the process was that the fleece remained in one piece, thus simplifying downstream handling. However, improvements still needed to be made. In 1990, the team demonstrated almost faultless shearing on numerous occasions for a major review of the research program. The main outcome was a recommendation to proceed with a field trial unit, but the collapse of the wool market has forced the corporation to postpone this for 2 years. In the meantime, the team has switched the research emphasis to reliable shearing on the full range of Australian sheep. The main aim is to predict accurate surface models for every different kinds of sheep by using a combination of statistics, databases, 2-D vision, and 3-D ranging.
ISSN:0143-991X
1758-5791