A Mobile Intelligent Poultry Feed Dispensing System Using Particle Swarm Optimized PID Control Technique

Abstract

Poultry farming in the tropics incurs a high cost on farmers due to the manual pattern of feeding. This in turn gives a low return on investment, low yield and low profit. These shortcomings of the manual pattern of feeding 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. This study describes the development of a mobile intelligent poultry feed dispensing system using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) tuned Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) control technique. The system is capable of moving in a structured environment within a deep litter poultry farm and dispenses solid and liquid feed to poultry birds. The performance of the system was evaluated in terms of the system response using the Overshoot, Rise time and settling time as parameters. The result after successful testing and performance evaluation of the system showed that the system can be used by farmers to easily administer both solid and liquid feed to poultry birds with a high return on investment, high yield and profit. The developed mechatronic system can be adopted by farmers to reduce high level of human involvement in poultry feeding.