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Collaborative project: Development of a self-maintaining, digital fence system to promote grazing - subproject A (SmartFence)

Project


Project code: 281C212A19
Contract period: 01.10.2020 - 30.09.2023
Budget: 269,619 Euro
Purpose of research: Experimental development
Keywords: labour economy, husbandry techniques, animal species comprehensive, precision livestock farming, sensor technology, animal welfare, monitoring, digital world, cattle

The SmartFence Project aims to promote grazing by developing a self-maintaining, digital fence system. The potential benefits of grazing for animal welfare, climate and environmental protection and efficient ressource consumption, are vastly underutilized. Obstacles are mainly increased labour costs of grazing, especially for maintainance of fences. SmartFence compensates this disadvantage and continues to fully automate grazing. The system to be developed will have a) special fencing material designed for optimal recognition with computer vision (cv) techniques; b) an intelligent upgrade module, consisting of a master unit and several measuring units which continuously monitor the voltage on the fence in realtime, detect failures more reliably than any existing system and localizes them; c) an autonomous patrol and maintenance vehicle that moves out periodically and in case of failures, navigates along the fence, recognizes and documents the fence's condition, exactly locates the position of a failure, notifies the user and regulates ingrowing vegetation; d) a central server with a graphic user interface (GUI) that allows users to contol the system and allows communication between SmartFence devices.

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Subjects

Excutive institution

Agricultural Engineering

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