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.