| Title: |
Remote Cattle Movement Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks |
| Category: |
Faculty |
| Intellectual Property: |
Student team assigns intellectual property management to University of Arizona |
| Year: |
2009 |
| Semester: |
Fall |
| Sponsor Name: |
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Arizona |
| Sponsoring advisors: |
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| Sponsor URL: |
http://ag.arizona.edu/arec/arechome.html |
| Sponsor Information: |
Russell Tronstad is a Professor and Extension Economist in the Dept of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AREC). His research interests include agricultural marketing, range livestock, and decision tools that consider production, marketing, and risk factors.
John Dale is an Applications Systems Analyst, Sr. in the AREC Dept with over 10 years of professional Enterprise Java experience with emphasis on modeling, database design, and Object-Oriented Design and Analysis. He holds a BA in Philosophy, a CS Minor, and MS in MIS from the U of A. |
| ITAR Restriction: |
No |
| Scope of work: |
In 2008 there were over 101 million head of cattle and calves in the US, with the U.S. cattle and beef industry producing an equivalent retail value of $76 billion. In the last decade the federal government has been pushing a plan to allow rapid tracking of livestock with the intent to quickly enable detection of diseases among animal populations, and quarantine those infected. However, the cost and complexity of deploying existing tracking systems currently outweigh the advantages to ranchers.
The AREC and ECE dept are teaming up to investigate the use of wireless sensor networks within the agriculture domain. Specifically, the proposed project will develop a system to track the location of cattle within a large heterogeneous field. The tracking data will enable farm managers to setup useful alerts for certain conditions, such as animals that remain idle for a pre-defined timeframe or move outside of the grazing range.
1) Investigate and propose a variety of system implementations – different ID tag implementations and infrastructures that track cattle location and forward the data to the farm house via the sensor network. Systems will consider how to balance a number of competing metrics including but not limited to cost, size, power, and accuracy.
2) Selection of 1-2 promising identification tag designs, with corresponding physical implementation for use within the field for testing. Specific number of tag prototypes will be decided with sponsor and dependent upon design, time, and cost.
3) Implementation of underlying support infrastructure in the field, including the localization algorithm at base stations and forwarding of data packets to gateway for uploading to the web-capable management system. The proposed wireless sensor network will feed data to a J2EE-based livestock records information system built by the team at AREC, thus this project will only require packets to be forwarded to this software interface.
4) In-field testing of design. |
| Project summary: |
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| Disciplines: |
Mechanical Engineering (1)
Computer Engineering (1)
Electrical Engineering (1)
Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (2) |
| Skills: |
Microcontroller Programming
Interfacing to peripherals
Prototyping
Basics of network protocols
Basics of wireless Communications |
| Additional resources: |
Dr. Loukas Lazos and Dr. Susan Lysecky will serve as faculty mentors for the duration of this project. |
| Key Contact Name: |
John Dale |
| Key Contact Email: |
jcd@cals.arizona.edu |
| Key Contact Phone: |
(520) 621-6262 |
| Project URL: |
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| Mentor Name: |
Ivar Sanders |
| Mentor Email: |
isanders@email.arizona.edu |
| Mentor Phone: |
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