The design and evaluation of a mobile sensor/actuator network for autonomous animal control

  • Authors:

  • Tim Wark;Chris Crossman;Wen Hu;Ying Guo;Philip Valencia;Pavan Sikka;Peter Corke;Caroline Lee;John Henshall;Kishore Prayaga;Julian O'Grady;Matt Reed;Andrew Fisher

  • Affiliations:

  • Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia;FD McMaster Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Armidale, Australia and Food Futures Flagship, CSIRO, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper investigates a mobile, wireless sensor/actuator network application for use in the cattle breeding industry. Our goal is to 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. Furthermore, there are significant challenges in this type of application because it requires dynamic animal state estimation, real-time actuation and efficient mobile wireless transmissions. We designed and implemented an animal state estimation algorithm based on a state-machine mechanism for each animal. Autonomous actuation is performed based on the estimated states of an animal relative to other animals. A simple, yet effective, wireless communication model has been proposed and implemented to achieve high delivery rates in mobile environments. We evaluated the performance of our design by both simulations and field experiments, which demonstrated the effectiveness of our autonomous animal control system.