Electronic Sheepdog: A Novel Method in With UAV-Assisted Wearable Grazing Monitoring

Abstract

The application of Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology to help herders monitor livestock makes intelligent and scientific grazing possible. In order to solve the limited functionality of the existing monitoring equipment and reduce the flight time of the UAV, a novel wearable grazing system with UAV-assisted monitoring is proposed in this paper. First, the system can monitor physiological parameters such as running, falling, and feeding, as well as geographic parameters. The acquired geographic location is used to implement electronic fences. When the livestock leave the specified area, the voice playback module simulates the sound of sheepdogs to drive them back. Then, Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology is used to transmit data. The monitoring values of physiological and geographic parameters can be displayed on a terminal. Finally, when an alarm occurs, an UAV instead of a herder arrives at the grazing area, where the UAV is used as an auxiliary device. Combining these technologies can realize the design of electronic sheepdogs. The standby algorithm is used to reduce the system’s power consumption. The experimental results show that the reliability of livestock posture monitoring was improved by the Kalman filter algorithm, the accuracy rate of the alarm was 97.2%, the maximum positioning error was 9.378 m, the minimum positioning error was 1.259 m, and the UAV could return safely at a flying distance of 6 kilometers. Therefore, using a combination of UAV and IoT systems greatly improved the efficiency of grazing monitoring.