Floor sensors of animal weight and gait for precision livestock farming

Abstract

We report first results on developing smart sensor systems for the automatic and frequent collection of animal weight and gait data, under the hostile conditions of a livestock farm. The novelty in our approach is to sense frequently the animals' floor contact, in suitably chosen locations, under natural and unobtrusive conditions. We demonstrate a pilot low profile rubberized mat sensor heads, delivering a large number of plastic optical fiber transmission measurements taken frequently from individual deformation sensors. The acquired data allows gait analysis from guided-path tomography images or by machine learning. We demonstrate weight estimation with accuracy better than 1% over a range suitable for deployment in pig farms.