Robot Chow: Automatic Animal Feeding with Intelligent Interface to Monitor Pets

Abstract

According to the latest IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) survey, there are more than 74.3 million dogs and cats in Brazil. Moreover, the highest cost for raising these animals is pet feed, which should be served at appropriate times and quantities. In contrast, the daily lives of pet breeders have often unforeseen events such as meetings, last minute trips, traffic jams, among others. With the purpose of helping the difficulties faced by small domestic animal breeders, this work presents the implementation of a solution called RobotChow, capable of serving granulated feed and water exchange at pre-scheduled times and volumes for pets; in such a way that the user can monitor if the animal is feeding. For this, the customer can use instant messaging on the mobile, with a solution interface that controls the features only interacting ("chatting") with the application. In addition to providing commands, the solution also send photos or even notify the user if something is unusual to happen with the pet. The user can monitor his/her pet regardless of space-time, just accessing the internet. The entire solution was developed in Raspberry pi, using Python, and it is integrated with the Watson Assistent and Telegram cloud services.

Automatic solar-based pet food dispenser system

“…Thus, one of the preventive approaches to address the feeding time and free feeding as well as health problem issue that motivates the researchers is to propose a semi-automatic or automatic pet food dispenser system, instead of manual feeding or free feeding for the convenience to pet owner. Various methods such as weight mechanism, time-based employing Arduino Uno [5], Arduino Mega [6], ESP32 [7] Raspberry Pi [8,9], have been proposed.…”

“…It is demonstrated that Raspberry Pi is a very flexible tool as it helps to communication with the motor driver, sensors, and motor stepper so that the food dispenses when the pet approaches. As the food dispenser in [5][6][7][8][9][10] requires only Alternating Current (AC) or Direct Current (DC) power, it is inoperable when there is no energy supply. All these issues can be resolved with the use of an autonomous pet food dispenser and a solar-powered system to promote and sustainable environment.…”