It's cool that this allows the cows to be milked whenever they feel like it. I'd imagine the autonomy actually does improve the cow's quality of life. Also neat that they learned to game the feeding robot. It reminds me of the image recognition experiments they do with birds.

And how they had to inhibit greedy cows with the munchies from volunteering to be milked too often, just to get treats!

There are certain things you just can't predict, and have to learn in the field...

These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!

Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.

And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.

Here are the videos from the article and some more:

The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zYshsAg1E

Takes Dairy Farm Tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZY8TbBoDd0

Zeta - how it works - EN - NL subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17TA-lI_oqQ

Zeta - Vision film - EN - NL subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nRaj16tPLc

Their web site has a pretty cool "page not found" error page too:

https://www.lely.com/moo

I wonder if you can rent swarms of these and dispatch them to anywhere you need them:

https://www.lely.com/solutions/manure/discovery-collector/

Or if you can use them in reverse, loading them up them dumping shit wherever you wanted to, like a giant Logo Turdle, in the name of art and science.

Pretty primitive stuff compared to SOTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ