Intelligent Chicken Health Monitoring and Egg fertility assessment System

The poultry sector is an important and vibrant segment of agriculture in Pakistan. This industry is one of the largest growing industries in Pakistan and is being practiced as small and medium scale business (SME). To have the decent impact on the economy through this sector, there is a need to intr

Project Title

Intelligent Chicken Health Monitoring and Egg fertility assessment System

Project Area of Specialization

Internet of Things

Project Summary

The poultry sector is an important and vibrant segment of agriculture in Pakistan. This industry is one of the largest growing industries in Pakistan and is being practiced as small and medium scale business (SME). To have the decent impact on the economy through this sector, there is a need to introduce and develop technological solutions that can boost the production and quality of the product in Agrifood.

The control shed are very much common these days which have automated environment control with a scheduled food and water supply system. However, these control shed do not have a mechanism to assess the health of the chicken birds. Most of the work is performed manually and the sick and dead birds are separated. There is also no checking mechanism of the egg fertility which results in the reduced yield in the hatchery.

With the rise of Artificial intelligence and modern vision technology, it is possible to bring solution to the health assessment problems in the control sheds. In this project, we are aiming to design and develop an intelligent system for the monitoring and screening of chicken birds in the control shed. Using the AI approach, the physical conditions of the chicken birds will be monitored and their health condition will be assessed. A sensor based intelligent system will check the chicken eggs fertility if they are able for the hatchery process or not.  The health of the chicken birds is related to environment directly so the automation of the shed will be controlled accordingly.

A completely automated and sensor based environment shall be designed that will be sensing the parameters of the control shed environment and the control unit will be controlling it through controlling devices.  There will be completely automated food and water refilling system based on the need of the birds and a prescheduled routine. All the devices and sensors will be monitored on the remote end as well using the state of the art Internet of Things (IoT) platform that also be able to control the environment remotely.

Following is the summary of the stated description:

• Monitoring the environmental parameters including the Gas, Light, Temperature and Humidity.
• Automatic feed and water process.
• Health and egg fertility assessment models.
• All processes will be controlled by IoT.

The project block diagram is given below.

Project Objectives

1. Design and Development of the prototype chicken bird shed.
2. Design and development of sensor banks for the prototype control shed.
3. Design and Development of control unit that will be monitoring and controlling the environment through sensors and controlling devices respectively.
4. Design and development of Food filler module.
5. Design and Development of water refilling module.
6. Development of Machine Learning algorithms and implementation of health screening of chicken birds using Raspberry PI.
7. Design and Development of Egg Fertility Assessment System using sensors and Raspberry PI.
8. Development of remote end IoT platform.

Project Implementation Method

The project will be implemented in the following phases:

1. Design and Development of the prototype chicken bird shed.                                                                                            A prototype area of size 4*5*3 feet will be designed that will serve as the control shed. 
2. Design and development of sensor banks for the prototype control shed.                                                                        Three bank of sensors will be developed. Each bank will be comprising temperature, humidity, gas and LDR. These sensor banks will be installed in different parts of the control shed and will be monitoring the environmental parameters. Each bank will have on board power unit as well. 
3. Design and Development of control unit that will be monitoring and controlling the environment through sensors and controlling devices respectively.                                                                                                                                    All the bank sensors will be connected physically with a controller unit that will be monitoring the environmental parameters of the sensors and based on the values, controlling devices such as light, fans will be operated. 
4. Design and development of Food filler module.                                                                                                                    A food filler module will be designed using a controlled and motorized procedure that will be capable of filling the food tank as per schedule and the need of the chicken birds. The decision will be based on the factors such as number of birds and the amount of food consumption. 
5. Design and Development of water refilling module.                                                                                                             A Water filler module will be designed using a controlled and motorized procedure that will be capable of filling the water tank as per schedule and the need of the chicken birds. The decision will be based on the factors such as number of birds and the amount of water consumption. 
6. Development of Machine Learning algorithms and implementation of health screening of chicken birds using Raspberry PI.                                                                                                                                                                            A machine learning model based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) will be developed that will be trained on the dataset containing the health features such as weight, temperature, age and other factors and will be assessing the lameness factor of the bird. The model will then be implemented on hardware using Raspberry PI and camera. A separate setup outside the control shed will be setup where health assessment will be done on a scheduled time. 
7. Design and Development of Egg Fertility Assessment System using sensors and Raspberry PI.                                   A separate hardware setup will be implemented using Raspberry PI where the eggs of the chicken birds will be assessed. The PI will be loaded with the ANN model and will be assessing the fertility of the egg. The model will be trained on the dataset features such as color, weight and age of the egg. 
8. Development of remote end IoT platform.                                                                                                                    Thingspeak based IoT platform will be developed that will be capable of monitoring the control shed environment and has the operability of controlling the devices to maintain the shed environment.

Benefits of the Project

The project can bring the following benefits to the industry.

1. This system can be used in egg hatchery units, chicken feed manufacturing system:                                               This system provided an automatically and non-destructive method to distinguish fertilized and unfertilized for current hatcheries. Therefore, it would be advantageous to the hatchery industry of developing a non-destructive, rapid, and accurate method to detect the fertility and embryo development of eggs. 
2. An intelligent and improved way of monitoring the health of chicken birds at the earlier stage:                                    Our project intended to explore utilizing an Intelligent System which used an Embedded Framework and Smart Phone for monitoring chicken farm to control environmental parameters using smart devices and technologies. It can reduce manual intervention and decrease economic losses by early detection of diseases, poor health or fertility.
3. This system can be used in both small and large-scale poultry farm:                                                                             We can use this system in large and developed poultry industries as well as in cottage industries for business purpose. Availability of growingly inexpensive computational resources, IoT devices, and standard algorithms, has made a strong case to employ modern day technology to continuously monitor the large farms with millions of birds and improve the overall productivity. 
4. A sustainable method of monitoring the chicken health environment using state of all technologies like Internet Of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence:                                                                                                                      Technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has made its way into our lives and businesses. Nowadays automation plays very important role in our life, where the combination of wireless and mobile network is used to remotely monitor and maintain poultry farm. Automation of poultry farm by using Internet of Things for Mobile Communication. The development of an automatic chicken feeding machine using IoT can be very useful to the growth of the poultry industry. Developing and deploying the software and visualizations required to monitor poultry management operations at an industrial scale.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The project will have the following technical deliverable:

• An automated control shed with environmental sensors:

In this system, we use ARDUINO Mega2560 microcontroller which acts as brain of the system, because the entire system program instruction stored in it. Here we have GAS SENSOR MQ-2 to detect the presence of ammonia, if it detects the quantity of ammonia gas larger than the threshold it will give an alarm with the help of buzzer alert, as a result farmer will manually open the windows. DHT SENSOR to detect the temperature and humidity of the farm, if the value of temperature and humidity exceeds the threshold value it will turn ON the exhaust fans. LDR is used in a control shed, to indicate the presence or absence of light, or to quantify the light intensity, Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) is used when there is a need to sense the absence and presence of the light. It is used in light system in poultry farm only during critical conditions like darkness in the rainy season. If the darkness increases due to some emergency situation as a result DC bulbs turn ON.

• Bank of sensors

Three bank of sensors comprising temperature, humidity, gas and LDR that will be monitoring different parts of the shed.

• Power Regulation Unit

A centralized power unit will be there that will be providing voltages and power to all the modules and devices in the control shed.

• A remote IoT setup capable of monitoring and controlling the environment and all the modules:

We are using NodeMCU for serial communication with Arduino. NodeMCU is a low-cost open source IoT platform which includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi. All the data fetched from the sensors which are controlled by Arduino are send to NodeMCU which is updated to internet cloud(Thingspeak), therefore the operation are either controlled or monitored by IOT.

• An automatic feed and water flow process controlled by IoT:

It will be a complete motorized solution for Food and water refilling system.

• Health Assessment Module

It will be a Raspberry PI based setup that will be capable of assessing the chicken bird’s health using the Vision image. The model for decision is Artificial Neural Network.

• Egg Fertility Detection System

It will be a Raspberry PI based setup that will be capable of assessing the chicken bird’s egg fertility using the Vision image and sensors. The egg will be assessed based on the color, age and size using ANN model.

• A prototype field for the demonstration of the work:

Our proposed prototype will be a rectangular structure with 6x3x2 size(feet). The structure will contain main controller, feed and water controller, health and fertility assessment model, power source, motor drivers and IoT controller.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Food

Other Industries

Health

Core Technology

Internet of Things (IoT)

Other Technologies

Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com