PRE2017 3 Groep5
Group members
Bogdans Afonins, 0969985
Andrei Pintilie, 0980402
Stijn Slot, 0964882
Andrei Agaronian, 1017525
Veselin Manev, 0939171
Project definition
Subject
The world population is rising exponentially, increasing the demand for commodities such as eggs, meat, milk, leather and wool. The supply can be increased by either increasing the number of livestock or its productivity. Farmers are forced to keep hundreds of animals, which makes the manual tracking of the individual animals not practical. Domestic animals can get sick, lost or get stolen and sometimes it is too difficult to detect this when the animal is along with hundred others. Current advances in technology can be adopted for use in the farming sector and by doing so all the previously described problems can be easily solved. This will ensure the animals welfare, increase productivity and ease the work of farmers around the world.
Objectives
The objective is to design and possibly implement a solution for the automation of the farming sector. More precisely, realize an animal tracking model, which is capable of first distinguishing the individual animals and after that determining their health status, based on their behavior.
Users
User requirements
Background
Animal sickness
Animal detection
RFID
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags can store and transmit data through electromagnetic transmission. RFID readers can be used to detect RFID tags within certain ranges. Combination of RFID tags and readers can be used for detecting moving object such as animals.
In a paper by Seol et Al, RFID tags are used for tracking large number of moving objects.[1] The idea is as follows: each entity that is supposed to be tracked must be equipped with a basic RFID tag, that can receive queries and respond to so called readers. The readers are static and are supposed to be positioned all around the area. Every reader has a certain range it can operate in. So it can communicate/detect entities only within that range, for example 5 or 10 meters. The readers will pass the presence information of a certain tag to the central server that stores this information appropriately. The central server is responsible for gathering data and operating on it, for example by approximating a path that a tag took, keeping track of the number times that a certain tag appeared in a certain location.
Camera detection
Animal monitoring
Sensors
Monitoring devices
Project
Approach
In order to complete the project within deadlines, we plan to start reading and summarizing the papers in the first week, being followed by establishing the USE aspect plus the impact of the technology on the animals. In the fifth week already, we plan to start working on the prototype which will be a simulation in Java that will show a location(has to be determined) and few types of animals(chosen according to the sick behavior study). Then, by allowing the user to select an animal, that animal becomes sick, the simulation detects that and finally reports it to the user. During last weeks we also have to specify why is it robotics and what advantages or disadvantages are present.
Planning
Milestones
Milestones are shown in the planning picture. In the first week, we already plan to have summarized the papers and use them to identify patterns in sick animals behavior and what technologies can be used to detect these changes. In the 3rd week, the milestone is to deliver a full analysis of the USE aspects. During the following two weeks, we expect the simulation to work. The last milestone is to prepare all deliverables for handing in.
Deliverables
As deliverables we decided to prepare the following:
A presentation, which will be held in the last week. During this presentation, all of our work will be presented and a simulation will run.
A simulation of the subject treated. For example, a barn that has a lot of animals(about 200-300) of different species(cows, pigs, chickens). The user will be allowed to place the identification technologies around the barn and "make" some of the animals sick. The simulation shall be able to discover which animal is sick by analyzing its behavior. The user is notified which animal might be sick.
Research paper of the technology described above, which will take into account the advantages, disadvantages, costs, and impact of such an implementation.
Roles
Coaching Questions
- ↑ Seol, S., Lee, E. K., & Kim, W. (2017). Indoor mobile object tracking using RFID. Future Generation Computer Systems, 76, 443-451.