Virtual Fences for Controlling Cows Presenter: Serafettin Tasci

Problem Definition Herding: Animals are rotated frequently between paddocks to prevent overgrazing of any one pasture. Goal of the study: constrain the location of the animal by a moving virtual fence algorithm A first step toward automatically controlling the location of individual animals as well as the herd It can also be used to monitor the grazing behavior of animals in order to create models that will lead to better land and pasture utilization

Challenges Short battery life About 2 hours 40 minutes Lack of fully water resistant devices especially for rainy days Many components should be combined into a single unit Easier water resistance and higher battery life possible Usage of sound stimuli due to stringent requirements Electric shock is known to be more effective but cruel

System Requirements A smart collar consisting of a GPS unit, a Zaurus PDA, wireless networking, and a sound amplifier Zaurus PDA : 206MHz Intel StrongArm processor, 64MB of RAM, with an additional 128MB SD memory card Embedix Linux with the Qtopia window manager Wireless network connection : compact flash card GPS Unit: eTrex GPS unit is connected to the serial port of the Zaurus Sound amplifier: A small Smokey brand guitar amplifier

Implementation Issues Fence: defined as a point on the surface of the earth, a ”safe” direction, and a velocity. Message Handling: Wireless network and Unix pipe messages Multi-hop ad-hoc networking because the pastures are too large for single hop messages to reach all the animals. But generally, the number of hops required for an Alive message to reach the laptop base station is very low since cows tend to move together. Logging and Time Synchronization: All log entries are accompanied by a time and date stamp. GUI: add buttons for triggering sounds on specific cows, a map showing current cow locations and status, and a status display showing whether Alive messages have been received recently from each cow.

Experiments Matlab simulation Aimed to test the various virtual fence techniques Real-world physical experiment Done with 10 smart collars on cows at Cobb Hill Farms in Vermont Targeted at 4 issues: collecting data to create a grazing model for the cows, which is used in the fence control algorithm collecting connectivity data and information propagation data, which is used to determine the multi-hop routing method for networking the herd collecting stimulus response data for individual animals collecting response data for the virtual fence

Results The cows have a wide range of speeds throughout the day. They spend a large amount of their time moving quite slowly, and the rest of the time at higher, but differing, speeds. Some cows definitely reacted strongly to a sound stimulus, though they often quickly became inured to it, and stopped reacting. The cows noticed the sounds, but either ignored them or did not make the desired association with their position.

Future Work Run experiments with beef cattle on an open range in Australia Since they are wild, they may be more sensible to sound stimuli Help of animal behaviorists can be used in designing an effective collar system and virtual fencing algorithm

Questions??