An extremely simple-minded robot could let the scale wander around into
different chicken's territories.  Battery power and an RF reporting system
could make it pretty much automatic.  It wouldn't have to move very often or
very far to keep sampling different territories.  It could auto-tare to
compensate for the gradual buildup of chicken waste products, and signal
when human intervention was needed for cleaning or battery changes.  Size
the batteries right and you could do all its maintenance when you cycled a
batch of chickens off to market.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryan Pogge [mailto:rpogge@MICHAELANGELO.NET]
> Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2000 10:24 PM
> To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Chickens [NOT OT!]
>
>
> ok a thousand dollars to anyone who provides a solution which I use,
> poultry industry, very cost driven, every cent counts as the
> proffit margin
> on a bird is in the fractions of a cent per pound.
>
> problem:
>  finding the average weight of about 10,000 birds in a
> chicken house a day
> before market, old solution wiegh out a hundred or so by
> hand... average the
> numbers.
> this is to make sure they are at optimum wieght to goto
> market to provide
> maximum proffit.
>
> how do you do it electronicly with little human effort?
> at first we tried an electronic scale placed on the floor, hoping that
> enough chickens would step on it... problem is chickens are
> territorial...... pretty much only one or two chickens step on it...
>
> and it has to be relitivly simple...i.e. no large robotic
> vacume cleaner
> robots that rove around and suck up chickens, weigh them, and
> spit them out
> :-)
>
> any ideas?
> oh and my fathers company is www.Mountaire.com  for anyone interested.
>
> Ryan
>