Development of an Automatic Silkworm Breeding System

Abstract

This paper is about the development results of an automatic silkworm breeding system to reduce labor and time by automatically performing the works for silkworm droppings changing and feed its food. It consists of an automatic guided vehicle and a processing unit. The automatic guided vehicle transports a silkworm dropping changing frame mounted on a silkworm tray stand, and the processing unit takes over the dropping changing frame on it, removes excrement contained the droppings changing frame and feeds silkworm food. In the case of the current silkworm farming, because the breeding period for large silkworms (4 to 5 stage) is short to 14 days and the supply of mulberry leaves takes 98% of the total amount of mulberry leaves needed for breeding silkworms at this time, labor concentration is intensive, and all breeding works depends on manpower. Therefore, it was difficult to breed large silkworms on a large scale. Moreover, silkworms are bred by adding Silkworm bed (Seop) and mulberry in the silkworm tray, and their droppings changing is to separate silkworms and excrement by moving silkworm trays one by one, and the production cost increases due to the high-cost manpower for silkworm breeding. To solve this problem, technology for automating silkworm breeding has also been developed. However, there is still a limitation that silkworm feeding and droppings changing works are not suitable for mass breeding because a lot of labor and time are spent depending on manual work. Therefore, a new silkworm breeding system for breeding silkworm automatically is needed and so we developed an Automatic Silkworm Breeding System applying the droppings change frame, the inverting unit, the feeding silkworm food device and automatic guided vehicle.