Poultry House Robot: Barn Walks, ChickenBoy and ABB

In a broiler house, tens of thousands of birds grow up on a floor of litter, and someone has to walk among them several times a day looking for sick or dead birds, wet bedding and faulty equipment. A poultry house robot takes over part of those rounds. It drives across the floor or runs along a ceiling rail, watches the flock with cameras and thermal sensors, stirs the litter and, in newer designs, picks up dead birds. This post covers how farmers did the job on foot, the first robots of the late 2010s, Taiwan's new coop robots and where ABB robots could fit.

Young broilers along the feed and water lines of a long grower broiler house, photographed by USDA NRCS Texas in 2009. Photo: USDA NRCS Texas via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From 500 chicks to two to four barn walks a day

The US broiler business began with a shipping error. In 1923 Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware, ordered 50 chicks to replenish her flock, and a hatchery delivered 500 by mistake. She raised them in a small barn heated by a coal stove, her husband sold the survivors, and the profit let her raise 1,000 birds in 1924. Other farmers in Sussex County began turning their laying houses into broiler houses, and Steele is now considered the pioneer of the US broiler industry. A meat cross of Cornish and White Plymouth Rock lines appeared in the 1930s and became dominant in the 1960s.

The First Broiler House in Delaware, a building listed on the US National Register of Historic Places, in 2021. Photo: Linda Roy Walls / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Checking on the birds is still largely done on foot. According to Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, farmers in a commercial poultry house typically make two to four rounds a day to check flock health, litter conditions and signs of disease, and every entry raises the biosecurity risk because pathogens ride in on clothing and equipment. The litter of wood shavings or rice husks has to be turned to stop ammonia building up, and longer contact with ammonia in the litter is linked to dermatitis. In breeder houses, training hens to lay in the nests can take 8 to 10 trips a day to keep the birds moving.

Chicks at a pan feeder line on the litter floor of a grower broiler house, 2009. Photo: USDA NRCS Texas via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sensors did not change that much. "Nowadays we have sheds with 55,000 birds and we're still using three, maybe four temperature sensors at most, and maybe two humidity sensors," Theo Demmers of the Royal Veterinary College told Farmers Weekly in 2019, adding that they are not always at bird level. One of the first robots came from farmers. In France, poultry farmers Laetitia and Benoit Savary designed Spoutnic, a small robot that circulates the house seven days a week so that hens move around and lay fewer eggs on the floor. Their company Tibot raised €3 million in 2019, and by 2021 about 200 farmers were using Spoutnic.

A row of poultry houses with ventilation fans in their end walls, 2009. Photo: USDA NRCS Texas via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Ceiling rails, floor rovers and Taiwan's coop robots

ChickenBoy, developed by Faromatics, runs on rails fixed to the shed ceiling. It scans the floor for dead birds, draws a map of where they lie and photographs each one, and it also checks about 10,000 droppings a day as a sign of gut health. Robochick took the floor route: in a UK trial with the Royal Veterinary College and Applied Poultry among its developers, the robot toured a broiler shed twice a day in a spiral, each pass taking about two hours. The shed with the robot recorded a 2.9 percent improvement in feed conversion and 18.7 percent fewer rejected birds than the control shed.

A barn housing broiler chickens raised for meat in Canada, 2010. Photo: Chicken Farmers of Canada / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

On 16 October 2026 Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute described the system it built with the Livestock Research Institute. An overhead hoist vehicle runs on rails above the flock, while a ground robot patrols the floor using LiDAR, depth cameras and infrared sensors, with positioning accurate to within 10 cm. Thermal imaging lets it work in daylight or darkness, and "even a 0.5°C change in a chicken's body temperature can signal the early onset of health problems," said ITRI's Chung-Li Tai. The ground robot also turns the bedding as it goes, and an arm that handles up to 3 kg picks up dead birds.

Hens with bald patches on a perch in a deep-litter system, the kind of problem flock monitoring is meant to catch early. Photo: Maqi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not make a robot for inside the poultry house, so its role there is a possibility. ABB robots already work on poultry farms at the packing end. In April 2017 ABB installed a robotic palletizing system at Seng Choon Farm in Singapore, where one worker used to lift about 15 tons of eggs a day, and the farm reported a 30 percent rise in productivity. Inside the house, ABB's GoFa cobot comes in 5, 10 and 12 kg versions with protection up to IP67, so even the smallest one has more payload than the 3 kg that ITRI's arm handles. Our post on egg handling robots covers the packing end in detail.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot with a gripper at a work table. Photo: ABB

What poultry house robots still have to prove

ITRI's system combines overhead and floor views and replaces periodic rounds with real-time monitoring data and early warnings. ChickenBoy's photo of each dead bird already lets a farmer show vets what the birds looked like when they died, where before the farm could only count the dead. A floor robot also has to find its way between feed lines and drinkers. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 maps its own workspace with 3D Visual SLAM and shares those maps with its fleet, the kind of navigation a ground robot in a broiler house needs, though a barn would be a new setting for it.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 autonomous mobile robot carrying crates. Photo: ABB

For households the change shows up mostly in supply. Seng Choon Farm said its output rose from 150 million eggs a year to more than 200 million after its automation, and its managing director listed the daily jobs that still need doing: "feeding chickens, clearing manure, collecting, inspecting and sorting thousands of eggs a day." Cleaning and hygiene questions are much the same in other animal houses, as our post on barn cleaning robots for cattle and pigs shows.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

Dust is the first obstacle. "Dust, feces, humidity, and constant animal movement make reliable sensing challenging," said ITRI's Wen-Ching Ko. The birds have to accept the machine as well: in Robochick's first farm trials the flock was startled, while day-old chicks placed with the robot got used to it and even followed it. Money is tight for small makers building robots for a narrow market, and Tibot had six people when it raised its 2019 round. Most developers expect the farmer to stay, as Poultry Patrol's designer Jack Kilian put it: "I don't think it would ever replace a person."

Long poultry houses on either side of a farm track in Texas, 2009. Photo: USDA NRCS Texas via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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