The Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Sensor/Actuator Network for Autonomous Animal Control Presented by Nashwa Ahmed

The Main Idea Prevent fighting between bulls in on-farm breeding paddocks by autonomously applying appropriate stimuli when one bull approaches another bull. This is an important application because fighting between high-value animals such as bulls during breeding seasons causes significant financial loss to producers.

The Main Achievements Describe a novel real world sensing and actuation application (autonomous separation of bulls), which consists of many challenging tasks such as dynamic mobile object state estimations, and real time actuation. Design and implement: i) a mechanism to calibrate Global Position System (GPS) sensor measurements; ii) a simple yet effective communication model to transfer sensor measurements efficiently; iii) a robust state machine based mechanism to estimate the dynamic states of the mobile objects and perform appropriate actuation. Implement and evaluate the performance of our system by both simulations and field experiments, and demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the system.

The Challenges An important aspect of the collar design was protection against damage by cattle. RF antenna pointing out vertically from the top of the collar. that the cattle consistently destroyed the antenna within hours by either rubbing against a tree or even by co-operating with others to chew them off. our solution was to lie the RF antenna flat along the top of the collar. This enabled the antennas to last about six weeks.

The Challenges Cont. Using MAC state-machine with 6.5ms delay between each state and another to reduce collision. Bulls entered the paddock one at a time, to enable all animals to be separated at the start of the experiment. Another obstacles appeared for further work as: animals getting cornered in paddocks as well as better strategies to solve undesirable animal responses such as the “flight response”.

Pictures Plots of bull trajectories before and after stimuli (state ix = 4) for the first time four different bulls received a stimuli. Results are spread over treatment sessions from day 1 and day 2.

Pictures Cont. Plots of bull trajectories before and after stimuli (state ix = 4) for four bulls later in the treatment session.

Innovation In same way of controlling bull movement and examine their behavior, if consider both mail and female as their social interactions are of interest to scientists which provide valuable information on population dynamics. For example, mapping encounters between males and females can be correlated with mating events, enabling studies of gene flows through a population. Studying interactions between individuals from, within, and between species can be used to map potential disease transmission routes.