Automatic Cat Feeder with Breed Identifier Using YOLOv8

Clients

Techstack

Purpose

In a multi-cat household every cat has different dietary needs, and portioning the right amount for each one by hand at every feeding is impractical. This feeder set out to solve that automatically, recognizing which cat has come to eat and serving a portion sized for it without anyone standing over the bowl.

Description

We built a feeder that watches the bowl with a camera and uses a custom-trained vision model to tell thirteen cat breeds apart, from Abyssinian to Sphynx. When it identifies a cat, precision weight sensors on the hopper and bowl let it dispense an exact breed-specific portion and stop at the target weight, while a touchscreen shows live detection and enforces a daily limit for each cat. Teaching a machine to reliably recognize a specific animal and act on it in the physical world is exactly the kind of hard computer-vision-meets-hardware problem we like to take on.