Plataforma IOT para rastreamento e monitoramento para bovinos a pasto.

Abstract

Dairy cattle farming in Brazil is an important sector of Brazil's economy, which has been contributing to the food security of the population and improving the income of many farmers. There has been an increasing inclusion of new technologies, but it is still a sector in which predominates the medium technology exploitation model where animals are raised on pasture. Seeking to contribute to the development of the milk production chain, this work proposes the application of the concepts of agriculture 4.0, internet of things, automation, cloud computing and information & communication systems in the development of a new hardware and firmware platform for tracking and monitoring of animals raised on pasture. The components of hardware, firmware, cloud servers and applications were verified by means of tracking tests and behavior classification, carried out with animals in the pasture. After presenting the results of the verification and validation tests, it was found that the optical sensor used to capture the photoplethysmographic signal has a better cost / efficiency ratio when configured for a current of 10 mA and that the accuracy of the temperature sensor is equivalent to that of the Fluke 62Max infrared thermometer. The inertial sensor showed accuracy similar to the sensor used in the Samsung S9 cell phone and the classification algorithm allowed the identification of ingestive behaviors when grazing, idling and walking. In the GPS module, a maximum error of 0.89 meters was found in a measurement of 10 meters and the radio module LoRa obtained a transmission range of 273 meters and with a 7.4V and 5200 mA battery it was possible to maintain the device running for 28h25 (twenty-eight hours and twenty-five minutes). These results allow us to affirm that the objectives proposed for this work have been achieved. The main contributions of this work are the availability of a new instrumentation platform that provides the expansion of the experimental field applied to research areas on animal welfare as well as having the potential to become a commercial product of managerial support in the milk production chain.