Automatic Detection of Clinical Mastitis in Astronaut A3 TM Milking Robot

Abstract

Clinical mastitis (CM) in dairy industry is a major welfare problem, leads to the poor performance of dairy cattle and reduces the farmers’ profit (Halasa et al. 2007). Recently, most online CM detection models primarily focused on measuring electrical conductivity (EC) and milk color (Kamphuis et al., 2008; Kohler and Kaufmann,2003). In practice, most of farmers who use automatic milking system (AMS) look in addition to EC and colors at milk yield and other information when cows visit the AMS. The objective of this study was to combine EC and milk colors from a newly developed Milk Quality Control TM (MQC; Lely Industries N.V., Maassluis, the Netherlands) with dead milking time (DMT) and quarter yield ratio (QYR) and improve the detection of CM in AMS.