MiRobot: Milkman of the future?

Farmers will be able to sleep in a little longer when this new innovation for the milking of cows is completed. The MiRobot will allow farmers to milk complete parlors simultaneously with only one supervisor (as opposed to the current situation, where many operators are required). The system is cow-friendly and provides consistent and superior milking procedures to maintain the cow’s habits and and increase yields.


Source: Courtesy

What grabbed my attention to this was the rendition from Courtesy, which looks like a caterpillar with velocity stacks. It seems that with the implementation of this device it could cut overall costs of milk production, in that previously milking needed multiple persons on site to monitor the operation, but with MiRobot it would cut that down to one supervisor. The savings would be handed down to the consumer, which in these tight times would be welcome.

The Times of Israel reports that MiRobot is set to cost only $12,000 — far less than the cost of any milking robot system — so obviously there must be differences between the system and other robots. MiRobot’s CFO David Rubin said that the system sacrifices exacting accuracy, with parts and algorithms approximating the areas that the robot arms have to target in order to get the work done. But that’s fine for a milking station, said Rubin. “We are not talking about a machine shop, where a variation of an nth of millimeter is going to thrown off the entire manufacturing process. The cow’s teat — and the cow itself — is large enough that if the cup is positioned a few millimeters to the left or right, the milking process will be able to continue without a problem.”

MiRobot is still in the early stages of development at this point, as the company is in the process of raising capital to continue funding the project, and ultimately produce a working prototype.