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ObjectiveManual disinfection in large-scale sheep farm is laborious, time-consuming, and often results in incomplete coverage and inadequate disinfection. With the rapid development of the application of artificial intelligence and automation technology, the automatic navigation and spraying robot for livestock and poultry breeding, has become a research hotspot. To maintain shed hygiene and ensure sheep health, an automatic navigation and spraying robot was proposed for sheep sheds.MethodsThe automatic navigation and spraying robot was designed with a focus on three aspects: hardware, semantic segmentation model, and control algorithm. In terms of hardware, it consisted of a tracked chassis, cameras, and a collapsible spraying device. For the semantic segmentation model, enhancements were made to the lightweight semantic segmentation model ENet, including the addition of residual structures to prevent network degradation and the incorporation of a squeeze-and-excitation network (SENet) attention mechanism in the initialization module. This helped to capture global features when feature map resolution was high, addressing precision issues. The original 6-layer ENet network was reduced to 5 layers to balance the encoder and decoder. Drawing inspiration from dilated spatial pyramid pooling, a context convolution module (CCM) was introduced to improve scene understanding. A criss-cross attention (CCA) mechanism was adapted to acquire context global features of different scales without cascading, reducing information loss. This led to the development of a double attention enet (DAENet) semantic segmentation model was proposed to achieve real-time and accurate segmentation of sheep shed surfaces. Regarding control algorithms, a method was devised to address the robot's difficulty in controlling its direction at junctions. Lane recognition and lane center point identification algorithms were proposed to identify and mark navigation points during the robot's movement outside the sheep shed by simulating real roads. Two cameras were employed, and a camera switching algorithm was developed to enable seamless switching between them while also controlling the spraying device. Additionally, a novel offset and velocity calculation algorithm was proposed to control the speeds of the robot's left and right tracks, enabling control over the robot's movement, stopping, and turning.Results and DiscussionsThe DAENet model achieved a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.945 3 in image segmentation tasks, meeting the required segmentation accuracy. During testing of the camera switching algorithm, it was observed that the time taken for the complete transition from camera to spraying device action does not exceed 15 seconds when road conditions changed. Testing of the center point and offset calculation algorithm revealed that, when processing multiple frames of video streams, the algorithm averages 0.04 to 0.055 per frame, achieving frame rates of 20 to 24 frames per second, meeting real-time operational requirements. In field experiments conducted in sheep farm, the robot successfully completed automatic navigation and spraying tasks in two sheds without colliding with roadside troughs. The deviation from the road and lane centerlines did not exceed 0.3 meters. Operating at a travel speed of 0.2 m/s, the liquid in the medicine tank was adequate to complete the spraying tasks for two sheds. Additionally, the time taken for the complete transition from camera to spraying device action did not exceed 15 when road conditions changed. The robot maintained an average frame rate of 22.4 frames per second during operation, meeting the experimental requirements for accurate and real-time information processing. Observation indicated that the spraying coverage rate of the robot exceeds 90%, meeting the experimental coverage requirements.ConclusionsThe proposed automatic navigation and spraying robot, based on the DAENet semantic segmentation model and center point recognition algorithm, combined with hardware design and control algorithms, achieves comprehensive disinfection within sheep sheds while ensuring safety and real-time operation. |
