Development and trends of chicken farming robots in chicken farming tasks: A review

Chicken farming plays a crucial role in the chicken industry. As the market demand for chicken products continues to grow, chicken farming is expanding on a larger scale to meet production needs. To address the challenges posed by the increased workload and labor shortages in chicken farming, chicken farming is transitioning towards standardization, automation, and intelligence. The rapid development of mobile robot technology offers solutions for the automated and intelligent execution of tasks in various scenarios. The automated and intelligent execution of farming tasks by robots holds significant importance in terms of liberating labor, implementing standardization and stable production, ensuring animal welfare, and enhancing production efficiency. In this review, the current situation in the chicken industry and the challenges encountered in implementing automation and intelligence in chicken farming tasks have been summarized to fully illustrate the important role of robots in the automation and intelligence of chicken farming. Based on the proposed categorization that considers the generality of robot technology, we review the application of general-purpose robotic technologies in chicken farming, such as localization, mapping, path planning, control, and interaction technology. Additionally, we explore the development of task-specific robotic technologies for various chicken farming tasks, including inspection, dead chicken picking, chicken house cleaning, and floor egg picking. Some tables are used to record and summarize certain technologies. We have identified that there are still many challenges to overcome in order to achieve mature and stable operation of robots in chicken farming. These challenges include significant technology homogeneity and a lack of attention to the characteristics of scenes and objects in chicken farming environments. To ultimately achieve the goal of an intelligent unmanned chicken farming system, future research priorities and development trends have been highlighted.