A dairy barn without a farmer: working on autonomous barns in NXTGEN Hightech
16 June 2025
Lely and Wageningen Research & University’s Vision+Robotics are collaborating in the NXTGEN Hightech programme, on autonomous barns in which different robots work alongside each other without literally getting in each other’s way. “Using robots should promote more sustainable and profitable business operations.”
Robots. They take over many jobs on farms. It’s important to be able to coordinate those tasks, says Martijn Bruggeman from Lely in Maassluis. Obviously, you don’t want two robots getting in each other’s way in the feed alley. “Not a great way to convince farmers to work with robots.”
Martijn Bruggeman of Lely
Of course. You can avoid such potential ‘industrial accidents’. You don’t get a manure robot to clean up manure in the feed alley while a feeding robot is feeding the cows. That would create problems. It’s just a matter of programming, says Martijn. “You ‘tell’ the manure robot to go and clean the back of the barn first, while the cows are all at the feeding rack in the front. That’s the kind of intelligence involved. But then automatically. You want robots to work in tandem on their own initiative. Because they are connected.” And soon, that will be even easier. When cameras are installed in the barn, for example. Martijn: “We’ll then be able to map the location of the animals and the robots in real time. Now, you still need the farmer to check that.”
NXTGEN Hightech
An autonomous barn. Simply put: a barn that operates independently. Where robots work together without getting in the way of each other or the animals. That is the approach of the NXTGEN Hightech project in which WUR is collaborating with Lely, among others. The NXTGEN programme is an important Dutch initiative involving a billion dollar investment until 2030 in the development of advanced high-tech equipment and production technologies. More than 330 companies and knowledge institutions are collaborating in this programme. Working on over 60 projects in six key areas including agrifood. The aim: to promote structural and sustainable economic growth and provide solutions to societal challenges in the field of energy, health, security and food supply.
New approach to farming
There are plenty of challenges within agrifood. The most important of these: available labour. People are unwilling to do agricultural work. Milking, feeding, and cleaning is boring and repetitive. Hence the arrival of milking, feeding, and manure robots. They make the work of the livestock farmer more enjoyable and, above all, more appealing to others. “Not every young farm worker wants to be crouching under udders two or three times a day,” says Martijn. Some want to focus more on the farm’s ecology or on animal welfare. Or study in their free time. “There are more part-time farmers nowadays. They might spend half of their time working as a vet, engineer or ecologist and then checking the barn in the morning and evening.”
Manure robot misses location
There are already some autonomous barns. When a son or daughter takes over their parents’ farm, they sometimes already have other jobs outside the home. They keep these jobs, and that’s no problem. Thanks to the robots, the dairy farm continues whether they are there or not. Martijn: “The son has his mobile phone with him all day, allowing him to monitor everything on the farm remotely.” Losing a phone signal, for example, can be really stressful. Because at that point he loses that overview. The phone can also alert him if a manure robot briefly loses its location. Or because you need to replace a part. A problem like that is quite easily solved, says Martijn. You can programme a robot to send you an advance warning. “Hi, this part will need renewing within a month. Why not do it now?” Martijn: “You want to avoid nine out of ten breakdowns through preventive maintenance. When the farmer goes to bed, he needs to wake up without seeing a list of faults on his phone.”
Milking robot is more animal friendly
Robots are a great alternative to repetitive work. “They not only make farm work more enjoyable, they also ensure more environmentally sustainable and profitable business operations. Martijn: “With robots, work can just continue.” They are also more pleasant for cows. Traditional milking can be very stressful for them. That’s because it’s scheduled. With a robotic milking system that is available 24/7, you leave much more to the cow herself. One cow might want to be milked twice, another three times. When nature calls, they naturally move towards that robot. The robot recognises the cow by its collar with all the data on it. Afterwards, udders and milk cups are cleaned to prevent possible disease. “This way of milking is more animal friendly.”
Farming background
Back to Martijn. He studied Business Administration in Rotterdam. After graduating, he joined agencies specialising in innovation grants. He spent ten years doing that. After which he started to get itchy feet. He had several clients in his portfolio, but he was looking for more specific knowledge of one company. Lely was one of his clients and they felt right. In 2019, he therefore joined the Maassluis-based company. Here he is responsible for all the subsidy and innovation projects that Lely works on with partners and knowledge institutions. No, he doesn’t have a farming background. “Many of the people working here go home to farm in the evenings.”
But why Lely specifically? Because of its business philosophy, says Martijn. The family-run business was founded in 1948 with an idea that was very topical at the time: never go hungry again. “We need to be able to produce enough food and make life easier for livestock farmers by means of automation. That is still the driver behind everything that Lely says and does.” A significant challenge: by 2050, there will be nine billion mouths to feed worldwide. This means we need to produce 70% more food. Martijn: “That requires efficient agriculture, in a sustainable and innovative way. With respect for people, animals and nature.”
Lely started manufacturing agricultural equipment in 1948. At the end of the last century, they switched to robotic automation. In 1992, they presented the milking robot. However, it took a while for farmers to embrace the robot as a serious milking alternative. Martijn: ‘Over the first five years, they sold around 500, today the annual figure is ten times that.” At Lely, they know it takes a long time for a new product to become a commercial success. There’s no point pushing it. “If the market’s not yet ready for it, that will come later.” That’s typical of a family business like Lely. It is not guided by the short-term but focuses more on building relationships and long-term success.
Challenges and anomalies
Around 600 people work in Lely’s product development department. And they all have a common gene: they are willing to deviate from standard techniques. Take the traditional feeding robot. It is attached to a steel rack or follows a floor strip and moves along the feed alley. Martijn: “We let our robot navigate through an area using a camera system.” Being a bit braver, being willing to look beyond the familiar – that works like a magnet for young people with a technical background. “We give them the freedom to apply the latest techniques in a fairly conservative market.” He often gets that feedback. Operating a robotic vehicle in a locked clean warehouse – that’s no longer really a challenge in a technical sense. What’s really exciting is when that same robot can navigate in a barn full of cows where there are lots of different obstacles. “If it works in the barn, it will work anywhere.”
Navigating obstacles in a cow barn
Loving fresh grass
The bigger, the better. Too often that is the norm for many agricultural vehicle manufacturers. Not at Lely. Look at their autonomous mower, the Exos. A smaller vehicle, nearly three metres wide. It cuts, transports, feeds and fertilises the grass. Moving over the land at a speed of 6 kilometres per hour. With more respect for what lives and moves there. Very different from those huge 15-metre-wide lawnmowers, which generally move a bit faster. Not without risk to meadow birds and mammals. The Exos brings the freshly cut grass directly to the cow. It tastes very different from the silage grass farmers usually give their cows. Seriously, says Martijn. “As soon as the cows hear that autonomous mower coming, they go wild. Great, we’re getting fresh grass!”
Local storage or in the cloud
Within the NXTGEN Hightech programme in which WUR is working with Lely, among others, it is about coordinating the autonomous mower, feed robot, feed pusher robot and manure robot. The project will last for 7 years. The first question: how to extract data live from robots. Do you want to store it locally or in the cloud? Martijn: “What information do you choose and how can you read it if your Internet connection is poor?” Another question: how can you remotely control a manure robot when it gets stuck, for example, or when the mowing robot needs to cross to another plot. And one of the final questions: “How can we make these robots so that they are reasonably affordable?”
The research is taking place on the WUR pilot farm in Leeuwarden, the Dairy Campus, and with several test customers. They are the real pioneers in the sector, says Martijn. One part of the NXTGEN Hightech programme has already been completed: the data landscape. Martijn: “We know how to bring data from the robot to a platform and how to integrate it with third-party applications.” One challenge is the robot installation. This can be done faster if you map a farm with a 3D camera. “With 3D mapping, you can easily load the environment onto your machine.” Considerable progress is also expected with respect to camera techniques and sensor technology. “The robots are equipped with the latest generation of cameras. They can see well and decide for themselves when to circumnavigate something.”
