SMART SWINE
Free trial
SMART SWINE · COLLEGE STATION, TX
Smart Piglet Curtain
A farrowing-crate device that acts on a crushing
risk
instead of just reporting it.
A torque-limited roller holds a soft fabric wall over the strip the
sow can roll onto,
and lifts it the moment she is safe.
THE CRUSHING EVENT
Crushing kills more piglets than any disease, and it is not random. Most crushing deaths happen during one specific event: the sow rolling from sternal to lateral lying. The roll goes to one side that is knowable in advance, and the window is about three seconds long. An alert cannot cross a farrowing room that fast. An actuator that is already mounted on the crate can.
A posture monitor can flag a sternal-lying sow with piglets in her roll path, but the fastest stockperson is minutes away and the roll takes seconds. Detection without an actuator leaves the last meter of the problem unsolved.
The curtain never has to stop a 250 kg sow. It only has to keep 2 kg piglets out of the strip of floor she is about to occupy. That is a light fabric barrier, closed early and lifted as soon as she settles, so nursing access is restored within seconds.
Crushing shares and roll statistics from published preweaning-mortality literature. SPC-01 is a concept industrial design, not production hardware.
HOW IT WORKS
The whole loop, rendered to real crate dimensions with SPM-01 watching from the crate rear. Scroll to run it: on her feet both strips stay curtained, SPM-01's forward camera reads her posture the moment it changes and beams the call to the curtain that must act, the safe curtain lifts, the roll lands on a strip that was never occupied, and nursing comes back.
On her feet she can step or drop anywhere, so both curtains stay down and the litter waits out on the strips.
She folds onto her sternum, loaded to her right. SPM-01 reads the change and signals the left curtain in real time.
The left strip is out of her reach, so the signalled left curtain lifts and hands that strip back to the litter. The right curtain holds.
The roll takes about three seconds, and it lands on the right strip that was kept empty. SPM-01 reads the landing as terminal.
Lateral lying is terminal. The right curtain gets the signal and lifts too.
The litter crosses from the left strip to the udder within moments. Closure never costs a feeding.
Rendered to North American farrowing-crate dimensions. Posture classes as classified by the SPM-01 pipeline. The wireless link between SPM-01 and the curtains is drawn as a stylized visualization. Roll duration is published preweaning-mortality literature and curtain travel is an SPC-01 design figure, not a field measurement of the curtain itself.
THE RULE
Crushing is a one-way transition. On her feet nothing is resolved yet, so both curtains stay down. From sternal lying she can roll to exactly one side without getting up, so only that side stays curtained. Both lateral postures are terminal, no further roll is possible from them. So the rule fits in five lines.
THE MECHANISM
The whole product is one overhead roller assembly. No posts on the floor, no rails, no moving parts at piglet height.
FABRIC
A 1.0 m curtain of coated polyester drops to the creep floor on a weighted hem. It stops a piglet, wipes clean under a pressure washer and weighs almost nothing.
DRIVE
The motor lives inside the tube, the way awning drives do. Full travel takes about two seconds, quiet enough not to startle the room.
FAIL SAFE
Power loss, signal loss or a manual pull on the coral release all end the same way: curtain up, and the crate behaving exactly like a crate without an SPC-01.
THE SYSTEM
SPC-01 is the actuator half of the Smart Swine farrowing system. The eyes belong to SPM-01, the dual-axis monitor already watching the crate from the rear. While the sow is on her feet both strips stay curtained. The moment she settles into sternal lying it knows which side she can roll to, and over the sealed wireless link the safe curtain lifts while the danger side holds.
Detects. Stereo depth reads posture and respiration, 99.15% posture classification on an unseen sow in a 10-sow farm trial.
Product page Meet SPM-01
Acts. Two independent curtain units close the danger zone SPM-01 has named, and lift when it clears. Each product also operates on its own.
01 · DETECT
The forward depth head classifies standing, sternal and lateral lying continuously, with no wearables and no floor sensors.
02 · DECIDE
Sternal lying resolves to a rollable side. That side's nursing strip becomes the danger zone until her posture changes.
03 · ACT
Standing keeps both curtains down. Sternal lying lifts the safe side and holds the roll path closed. Lateral lying lifts both, and nursing resumes.
INSTALLATION
Every fastener goes to the crate and nothing touches the floor, because the floor is pressure washed and scraped.
SADDLE CLAMP
A rubber-lined saddle snaps over the crate's top rail and a captive thumb screw closes it. No drilling, no welding, no tools, and removal is just as fast.
END BRACKETS
The two drop arms hold the static motor housing and the idler pin, exactly like a roller blind's end brackets, so the winding fabric is never obstructed.
FITS THE FLEET
The bracket span matches the common North American farrowing-crate top rail, and both curtain units install from the aisle in minutes.
WASHDOWN
Everything electrical lives at one end, in one sealed stack, speaking the same waterproofing language as SPM-01.
DRIVE HEAD
The finned motor housing closes the tube behind a blue compression O-ring, with the coral manual release on its nose.
CONTROL POD
RUN indicator, sealed antenna dome, membrane pressure vent and twin cable glands with strain reliefs, behind a perimeter-sealed lid on captive screws.
WASHDOWN
Every seam that faces the hose is a compressed seal, and the fabric itself is the same coated polyester used in barn curtains that are washed for years.
DESIGN BRIEF
A device that acts inside a farrowing crate has to be safe against its own mistakes. Three behaviors are part of the design brief, ahead of any performance figure.
The hem carries no cutting edge and the drive is torque-limited: a curtain that meets a piglet on the way down reverses and retries. Both units fail open on any loss of power or signal. The manual release needs one hand and no tools, and always ends with both curtains up.
SPC-01 is a concept industrial design under active development. The mechanism, mounting and materials shown are design proposals, not a production build, and no field performance is claimed for the curtain itself. The posture detection it relies on is the validated SPM-01 pipeline.
SPM-01 already watches the crate. SPC-01 is how the system answers what it sees. Ask about the farrowing system, or start with a free SPM-01 trial on one crate this season.