“Ready for Autonomy (R4A)”: concept and application for autonomous feeding

Abstract

This paper presents the development of the “Ready for Autonomy (R4A)” application for evaluating the feasibility of integrating an autonomous feeding machine Strautmann Verti-Q into farmyards and evaluating the machine’s performance. The proposed application consists of three main R4A checklists for telling whether the farmyard, the machine, and the farmer are ready for autonomy or not. The farmyard is the first part to be checked with the R4A application with the Verti-Q system requirements. The R4A result will be instantly generated from the application based on the Boolean function. The second part is the machine operation record which tells the overall performance of the Verti-Q machine as the R4A distribution results, e.g., excellent, good, and failure. The final part is the farmer operation training in manual and autonomous modes, in which farmers have to go through every topic to be ready to use the machine. From the experimental results, seven farmyards were observed with the R4A application. Therefore, the four farmyards are ready for autonomy with different R4A levels. The minimum working condition of the Verti-Q machine has been tested on the lowest R4A level farmyard. The distribution results from the prototype machine with 218 autonomous feeding jobs, achieving 42% in excellent distribution, 38% in good condition, and 21% in failure caused by various reasons, e.g., hardware, software, and user error, respectively. These results show the possibility of using the improved version of the autonomous feeding machine in the farmyard for sustainable farming in the future.