Dairy cows identification and monitoring on small cattle farms are usually based on the utilization of barcode technology. This kind of identification technology is unsuitable for dairy cows milking and feeding process automation. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a better solution in this case. This paper describes the research and implementation of the milking cycle´s automated monitoring with the use of RFID tags conducted on a small cattle farm in the Republic of Serbia. This solution is based on RFID system which consists of two parts. First part includes control box, two Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID readers operating at frequency of 915 MHz and RFID tags glued onto the dairy cow ear labels. Second part includes software modules for acquisition and collecting data from RFID tags to build up an archive due to supervision and analysis of the milking cycle. Reading accuracy of RFID system in the observed period was 99.8 % in average. A group of dairy cows having a settled milking cycle within an interval of 12h ± 5 % had a 1.5 % better yield and a 0.08 better quality in comparison with a group of dairy cows having a milking cycle variance higher than 20 %. RFID system implemented in described way can be easily integrated into a new or existing farm management system in order to have better production results which depend on several factors including settled milking cycles

Industry 4.0 is a paradigm that enhances industrial automation systems with the recent advances in the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), gaining new possibilities and providing new services. Traditional industrial machines do not have IoT capabilities, and in order to integrate such a machine into Industry 4.0, there is a need for an intermediary device or system that communicates with the machine through its supported communication interfaces and protocols and forwards the communication to the global network. This paper presents the development and experimental validation of a low-cost hardware module that can easily integrate the machine’s existing control unit into the IoT and enable synchronization of the measurements and states of the variables of the machine and its environment with a cloud server. The developed module is universal, can connect to any control unit that is able to communicate through basic RS232 serial communication, and does not require the control unit to have any higher level communication protocol implemented. On the other end, the presented solution uses a dedicated smartphone application to provide remote monitoring and control of the machine through the cloud by using the synchronized variable states, as well as further possibilities for storing, processing, and analyzing the historical data from the system. The developed solution was experimentally validated on an experimental setup consisting of a conveyor belt driven by a three-phase asynchronous electromotor controlled by a programmable logic controller through a variable-frequency drive.

One of the most difficult and most important engineering tasks is the integration of a robot-manipulator into material handling, assembly, and production processes, offering the possibility of supervision and control. The knowledge and skills required for these kinds of tasks are purely mechatronic and, thus, multidisciplinary. This paper describes a didactic manipulator, MRA-M01, designed and produced in a mechatronics laboratory of the Faculty of Technical Sciences Novi Sad, Republic of Serbia. This manipulator serves as part of the laboratory equipment used by students enrolled in courses in the Departments of Mechatronics and Industrial Engineering. The manipulator was created to enable students to gain practical knowledge of the integration of diverse engineering fields, including electro-pneumatics, sensors, actuators, programmable logic controllers (PLC), field bus systems, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, material handling, industrial engineering, and intelligent control systems. The manipulator MRA-M01 is a three-degrees-of-freedom manipulator, with three linear actuators. Two of those are pneumatic (one controlled in a standard way by a control valve, and the other using servo-pneumatics), and one is electromechanical (with a dc motor). This manipulator supports hands-on activities in class by assisting students in material-handling tasks, which involve them learning about the structure of the manipulator and its components. Through this learning process, students are able to evaluate the use of different methods of manipulator design. One of the most important learning gains is that of understanding manipulator implementation by working through different scenarios that simulate industrial tasks and conditions.