Development of an automated land-based system for cow monitoring

Robotic animal husbandry is nowadays mostly based on robotized breeding, feeding and milking systems, even if recently robots able to automatically clean manure alleys on demand or following a plan appeared in the market and wheeled and legged robots proved to be useful also to guide the animals in their pasture. In this field, the objective of the present paper is to introduce and describe a prototype of an automatic land-based system used for control and monitoring grazing animals and for autonomous management and control of the grazing conditions. The robot has the following main characteristics: right and left track unit with electric gearmotors for field applications; maximum payload 1t; removable lithium battery pack; maximum allowed slopes, longitudinal 100%, lateral 50%; automotive or Raspberry PI control unit for low-level management of the platform; on-board computer for navigation with Ubuntu and framework ROS2 Humble, on-board connectivity via 4G-LTE modem router, Wi-Fi for direct connection to the vehicle. The sensors mounted on board are a Lidar 3D, a GPS antenna, stereo cameras, a multispectral camera. The control sensor network is developed to create a dataset useful for defining the system's activities. The system's capabilities and features to recognize and monitor animals will be validated through on-site surveys. By means of the data collected by the robot, the correlations between animal activity parameters and environmental data can be studied and the interactions between the system and the animals evaluated.