Introduction of Commercial Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Livestock Monitoring : An Analysis
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are aircraft designed to fly without a pilot on board, also called mini flying robots, miniature pilotless aircraft, and drones (in this paper UAVs and drones terms are used interchangeably to refer to the same thing). The mutual collaboration of three major components is required to operate such an aircraft system: aircraft body, ground control station, and the sensor support . Their strength is the capability to reach a remote location with minimum time, effort, and energy, without human presence. In addition to their high mobility, low maintenance requirement, and easy deployment, UAVs have also eased the collection of outdoor aerial images and facilitated easy monitoring and analysis. Due to the recent advancement in electronics, communications, and embedded technologies, the fall in prices has increased its availability in the military, commercial and civilian applications. According to the Association for UAV Systems International, over 100 thousand new job opportunities will be created in the UAVs industry by 2025 . By 2027, the estimated global UAV market value will reach $3 billion, led by North America, Asia, and Europe, respectively . The UAV-driven paradigm has been described with its applications and challenges . The world first saw the use of drone technology during the First World War in military applications by the USA and France. However, it has witnessed a vast expansion of applications, global awareness, and a surge in interest in drones over the last few decades. Presently, the commercial drone market has a steady momentum and is expected to get more prominent in the nearest future . The long list of UAV application fields includes, but is not limited to, remote sensing, real-time traffic control, rescue operations, disaster monitoring, the inspection of civil structures, delivery of goods to remote areas, military applications, marine industry, border patrol, agriculture, livestock management, imaging and mapping, aerial photography, journalism, power transmission line and other cables inspection, etc. One of the most promising sectors for UAV deployment is agriculture, where the farmer gets a bird’s eye view of the entire field. Such technology can optimize a farmer’s effort by helping him to seamlessly analyze the whole ground, alleviating the hassle of manual inspection. Livestock farming, being an essential part of agriculture, is not an exception. Drones can significantly contribute to monitoring, detecting, and tracking the animals, searching for grazing lands, and reporting any abnormal situation to the farmer to safeguard herds from potential threats.
The world is moving towards precision agriculture and precision dairy farming. Precision Dairy Farming is the use of technologies to measure physiological, and production indicators on individual animals to improve management strategies and farm performance. Farming drones provide one of the most efficient waysfor farmersto monitor their livestock. Livestock Farmers can use drones to obtain an aerial overview of the area in which they keep their livestock or the pasture area in which the livestock are allowed grazing Drones can be employed to monitor livestock, assess crop health, assess drought conditions, and even to apply pesticides Drones fitted with a high definition camera can provide clear, concise image , while with a thermal imaging software will allow you to pick up areas of heat across your livestock.
The growing interests of users in the drone technology have developed new fields of application for it. Presently they are working in numerous areas viz medicine, military, forecasting, surveillance with a vast range of applications. Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology (Anderson and Gaston, 2013). Agriculture and livestock farming have also not remained untouched. In fact, since last few years farmers are realizing the benefit of drones in agriculture. With extensive and expansive range of applications of drones in wide spectrum of agricultural activities like spraying, crop health and monitoring, mapping and surveying. Drones carrying cameras with special sensors can be used to measure pasture growth, but this technology is still in an early stage of development the drone equipped agriculture is surely to take its place in near future. Livestock management is still being governed by traditional farming systems and still has shown less willingness to adopt new technologies. The livestock farming depends on so many factors like genetics, raising the livestock, feeding, health care, grazing of proper nutritious food, gathering produce and selling it. All these activities along with monitoring and proper supervision of the staff amounts to lots of energy and time on the farmers’ part. The need of the hour is to make livestock farming less labour intensive less time consuming and more economical. Drone technology with its numerous applications may prove to be critical to bridge this gap. Monitoring livestock population is an essential part of the farm management. However, this may not be a trivial task, especially in very large properties adopting extensive (Barbedo and Koeningkan,2018).
Cattle counting and monitoring
The use of drones for monitoring livestock is slowly gaining pace and in various countries. Australia and Israel have already started using lots of cattle monitoring drones. Drones or UAVs can be used to detect and count the number of cattle heads Drones can fly a quick round of the cattle shed or field at any time and capture images or make videos. These images can be easily checked or visualized to check the number of the cattle or any activity in the farm Anyone can see live video of any place by sitting at a distant place with the help of these drones. They are especially helpful for night time monitoring due to human eye’s inability see in the dark (Veroustraete,2015). When using cattle monitoring and tracking drones farmers can use drones embedded with thermal sensing technology which can find any of the animals using their body temperature. The drones provide clear thermal images which easily reveal the difference between one animal from another. An observer drone hovers 90- 270 feet above the herd. This drone uses downward- facing stereo cameras to track motion. It determines the location and orientation of the cattle. The drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) can help farmers with a way to remotely check on the location and health of each cow, allowing them address cattle health and safety issues much sooner.
Herding Cattle with Drones
As an era of automation and technology ushers in we have come across many reports of robots replacing human labour. Several countrieshave now explored the use of herding cattle and sheep with drones. Farmers can use a drone with a camera to locate the herd in the pastures and move it. This helps reduce the time it takes to move cattle. When you move a drone over the herd, they will move away from the sound of the drone. Many a times, some cattle move away from the herd It’s important to locate them and get them back with other animals in the herd. You can use the drone to make the stray animals move in the direction you want them to go. This is very useful in areas it’s hard to get to like hilly pastures where the herdsmen might have to walk a considerable distance of tough terrain and look for the livestock. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones can thus act as herders and can replace the dogs, the drone operators use these drones to keep an eye on the sick or escaped animals.
Farm Security
If one wants to look what’s in the bushes or around the trees or is there any trespasser or intruder it becomes very cumbersome for vast pasture land or fodder production area holder, by placing cattle drones to provide consistent information from remote areas, farmers can get a 360° view of their land. These drones can be used to spot other illegal activities too. These drones also help farmers to keep thieves away from the cattle field as they can be easily detected by thermal drones. It is much faster to respond and comparatively safer than any personal involved and comparatively saves more time and labour. One way to automate the process is putting an RFID tag on each animal which can then be used to accurately read and locate each animal with a drone. Using computer aided vision a programmable drone can detect a stray animal in a pasture and move it towards the rest of the herd. Moreover, if a rancher wants to locate a particular animal and check its condition, he would just have to type in an RFID number and the drone will go out and find it on the range.
Concerns: There are some factors to be considered, since animals can’t express themselves as clearly as humans. How will livestock respond, adjust or accustom to the presence of drones.one possible solution may be to monitor the level of the stress hormones to know the amount of distress as the stress encountered by the animal shall after all reflect in the productivity of that individual animals. Using manned aircraft for surveying cattle farms, has many drawbacks like higher operational costs, elevated noise levels that can disturb animals. (Christie et al., 2016). Several studies have documented changes in animal behaviour due close-proximity drone flights. Drones normally may tend to fly at lower level and may disturb the animals. Numerous studies have observed responses of wildlife to drones. In India with the fodder area and pasture land on the decline the drone technology seems to have limited use for small scale farmers who have limited land holding. Some concerns regarding the technical expertise still remain a concern like handling and processing of the captured data Also the UAV flight time is battery dependent and the aerial flight time is somewhere between 10- 30 minutes.
Finding the Best Drone for Cattle Farming
There are a few things that should be considered when buying a drone for checking cattle: 1) Drones for livestock management must have decent battery power. About a half hour of flight time is usually enough to see fences, ponds, mineral feeders, and cow location in a pasture. However, if your requirements are advanced and if you need more aerial time, look for drones with more battery power. 2) It should have a high-end camera for capturing video and images. Since you would want to see a bird-eye view of your herd or pasture, the camera should be good enough to give you quality video and images. 3) The drone should be able to withstand 25 mph winds. Before you make a purchase, do check how windy it gets in your area. If your drone can’t withstand high winds, you may end up losing or damaging your drone. 4) The companion mobile or tablet app that comes with the drone should be user-friendly and have features to manage operations associated with ranch management.
Conclusions:
UAVs are getting popular in today’s world and becoming ubiquitous in many outdoor activities. Agriculture is one of such applications fields, where drones have a high potential to be used. Livestock management is an essential part of agriculture, which deals with the issue of managing cattle animals, both inside the farmhouse, or outside while grazing. The outdoor aspect of cattle farming can be eased and modernized mainly with UAVs as the farmer can readily get the birds-eye view of the whole herd, which is impossible to have with conventional methods. Therefore, lots have been talked about and researched on this issue in the recent past. This survey discusses UAV applications, opportunities, challenges, solutions to those challenges, and future research directions in livestock management. The paper has gathered all the important articles related to the topic and presented them concisely, wherever suitable. Various aspects of cattle monitoring like detection, counting the numbers, identifying the types, tracking while grazing, health issues monitoring, rounding up the cattle, behavior monitoring, estimating the herd distribution, surveilling animal’s behavior, etc., are well summarized in this work. Moreover, a few broader but impactful issues like smart farming with IoT implementation, taking care of animal welfare, practicing machine learning approaches, improving inter-communication skills between drones, etc., are addressed with relevant references. The paper also highlighted the challenges in the field, the reason behind those, and the probable solution approaches.
Though initially designed for military use, UVAS”s /drones they have are now widely used in various fields. A essential feature for most UAV application in livestock is an integrated camera/thermal scanner, as it will allow images capturing. Some advantages of drones were listed which include time saving and reduction in human labor. However, there are a number of challenges limiting UAVs, most prominent among which is cost.
Livestock Management With Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Review
Compiled & Shared by- This paper is a compilation of groupwork provided by the Team, LITD (Livestock Institute of Training & Development)
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