Research and Development Highlights

Yodyium Tipsuwan, the head of Intelligent Robotics and Mechatronics Lab (INRAM), is currently interested in research on precision agriculture, an emerging research area which employs knowledge from communication technology, mechatronics, and control theory to increase the productivity of farming. This technology has recently been used abroad, e.g., in wine production.

After a discussion with the farming sector, Dr.Tipsuwan started working on a system for automatically dispensing medication to farm animals.

The current systems, widely used by large farming companies, combines the medication liquid and water internally. Because the medication liquid usually has erosion potential, the process reduces the life time of the dosing system.

To circumvent this problem, a peristaltic pump technology can be used to pump medication liquid. However, the dosing systems currently avaiable in market are quite expensive.

Dr.Tipsuwan and his team has developed an automatic doser, Smart Doser, with peristaltic pump technology build from domestic materials and components, e.g., dc motors, encoders, and a feedback control logics that the team design

The equipment uses feedback control system to control the speed of a DC motor that moves the liquid according to the flow rate of the liquid measured by an encoder.

Although Smart Doser has be in production use, Dr.Tipsuwan and his team continue to work on how to improve the performance of the system. One of an interesting research questions currently under investigation by the team is controlling of DC motors under periodic disturbance.