Towards the Development of a Mobile Intelligent Poultry Feed Dispensing System Using Particle Swarm Optimized PID Control Technique

Abstract

The manual pattern of feeding of poultry birds incurs an exorbitant cost on poultry farming. This pattern of feeding which is predominant in the tropics gives a low return on investment, low yield and low profit. These shortcomings are as a result of contamination of the poultry feed, wastage of the feed, fatigue and stress involved with monitoring of the birds and administration of the feed. Hence, there is a need for a system which is capable of addressing these limitations. This study proposes the design of a mobile intelligent poultry feed dispensing system using Particle Swarm Optimized PID control technique. The system will be capable of moving from one point to another within a deep litter poultry house, as well as dispense both solid and liquid feed to poultry birds at specific time intervals. The system shall be intelligent with a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller tuned with the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm in order to increase the performance of the system. The successful development of the anticipated intelligent poultry feeding system is expected to reduce human intervention, increase yield and profit as well as provides high return on investment in poultry farming.