How robots could soon help Iowa poultry growers

Could a robot workforce help big poultry operators cope with workforce shortages and security issues?

“It lives in the barn with the turkeys 24-7, 365,” said Jack Kilian. “Ideally, it never leaves the barn.”

In the garage and basement workshop of his Coralville home one recent morning, Kilian was readying a prototype Poultry Patrol robot for delivery to a large commercial turkey grower whose name he can’t yet divulge. Five years of work and more than 20,000 hours testing on turkey farms landed him a $50,000 loan last month from the Iowa Economic Development Authority to fund further proof-of-concept work and refine the manufacturing process.

“We can make more robots now, but there are a lot of little things we want to improve on — assembling the robot or long-term maintenance,” Kilian said. “Once you get the robot cheap enough so it makes sense, servicing and maintenance becomes the biggest cost.”

“He’s come a long way,” said John Zimmerman, who’s hosted a prototype robot on his Northfield, Minn., turkey farm for about five years. “Just like any industry, we face labor shortages and disease issues. When someone comes along with a product that could be another set of eyes and ears for the farmer, we’re going to be interested.”

“There’s a lot of promise,” said Yuko Sato, Iowa State University associate professor and Extension poultry veterinarian. “Because of biosecurity reasons, (farmers) want to reduce the number of people who interface with the flock. They can have a little more control of the situation in their day-to-day operations while they’re still out of the barn.”

Kilian, 31, got involved in robotics through his high school’s program in River Falls, Wisc.

“I always liked the idea that they can do work that we’d prefer not to,” he said.

After earning his master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Kilian worked at Digi Labs, a tech incubator in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. While there he developed a semiautonomous robot to detect and chase Canada geese from waterfront property, parks, and golf courses.

“We had it working,” he said. “Unfortunately, when we tried to market that to golf courses, they weren’t willing to spend a couple hundred dollars on a laser pointer that worked pretty well, let alone a robot that would chase the geese. So what else can this kind of robot be useful for?”

How about a similar-sized bird, raised commercially by the millions? More than 12 million turkeys — more than $10 billion worth — are raised each year at 130 Iowa turkey farms. With a few adjustments, Kilian’s machine could pivot from chasing geese to tending turkeys. The goose chaser became Poultry Patrol, which won initial funding through the 2019 Minnesota Ag Tech Challenge.

“I won enough money to buy a demo robot to start seeing how the birds move and what it actually means to run a robot in a barn,” said Kilian, who moved to Coralville when his wife Alicia Kilian accepted a residency at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Challenge money funded further development to enable the robots to function in a barn housing 6,000 to 10,000 turkeys.

“A lot of it comes down to getting a robot to survive in a barn environment, let alone how to run long enough, consistently enough to get anything good (data) out of it,” Kilian said. “It took a good amount of time and engineering to get all the parts right and stable enough that you could actually run an entire turkey flock.”

The result is robot built on an aluminum chassis and body about three feet square and a foot high, about the size of a lawn mower, with four-wheel-drive electric motors and a package of cameras and sensors mounted atop a mast. When not patrolling, the machine docks with a charging station installed in the barn.

A robust, watertight package is important. Zimmerman raises both “heavy hens,” your 12-to-15-pound Thanksgiving bird, and “heavy toms,” 45-pounders that become deli meats and other processed products.

Poultry Patrol requires broadband internet in the turkey barn, which may be rare in rural areas.

“That’s critical,” Zimmerman said. “We’re wired just like everyone else, but getting broadband access in rural Minnesota has been a challenge.”

Testing confirmed the robots’ presence in a barn can improve a flock’s health. Programmed to conduct four “barn walks” a day patrolling the rows of feeding stations, a robot attracts turkeys to follow along.

“They treat it like part of the flock,” Kilian said. “We’re basically creating multiple turkey parades in the barn each day, to keep them from becoming too sedentary. We’re seeing pretty dramatic improvements with bird health, which means a better bottom line for the farmer.”

“It’s more about getting them up and walking,” Zimmerman said. “The results in my farm and others are promising. You have to replicate these trials, and that’s what we’re doing now.”

Long before the emergence of the bird flu that’s decimated chicken flocks, biosecurity was a top issue on all commercial poultry farms, where workers don disposable coveralls and foot coverings before entering a barn, or even when moving between barns on the same farm.

Before robots, a farmer would walk the barn several times a day. Reducing that human contact for up to two weeks at a time would be a Poultry Patrol selling point.

“A turkey producer can have up to 10 barns on the same site,” Sato said. “You don’t want to cross-contaminate, so there’s multiple disinfections. There are kinks that need to be worked out, but I think it’s worth looking at these innovative approaches.”

Farmers are already suggesting potential future uses for the robots: an infrared camera to spot turkeys running a temperature, a simple rake towed behind the robot to prevent bedding from being compacted, modifications to spot and remove carcasses of dead birds.

“Once you have a stable set of wheels you have a good application you can build on and you can start looking at these other applications,” Kilian said. “We’ve been getting inquiries for pest-control robots, keeping birds away from a farm. It really starts letting you imagine different use cases.”

Fully developed, Kilian figures a farmer would pay less than $10,000 a year for a Poultry Patrol in one barn. He’s now focused on building the business case for that.

“Every robot flock except one or two has been the best livability that turkey farmers have ever had,” he said. “Birds with robots means more of them make it to market. That means a bigger paycheck for the farmer.”