Animal monitoring based on IoT technologies

Abstract

The placement of grazing animals in vineyards requires additional support to the animal husbandry activities. Such support must include the monitoring and the conditioning of animal's location and behavior, specially their feeding posture. With such a system, it is possible to allow sheep to graze in cultivated areas (e.g. vineyards, orchards) without endangering them. This paper proposes an animal behavior monitoring platform, based on IoT technologies. It includes an IoT local network to gather data from animals and a cloud platform, with processing and storage capabilities, to autonomously shepherd ovine within vineyard areas. The cloud platform also incorporates machine learning features, allowing the extraction of relevant information from the data gathered by the IoT network. Thus, besides the platform description, some results are presented regarding the machine learning platform. Namely, this platform was evaluated for detecting and defining conditions respecting animal's posture, with preliminary promising results. Since several algorithms were tested, this paper includes a comparison of those algorithms.