Evaluation of instrumentation for cow positioning and tracking indoors

It has been seen that changes in cows' behaviour are strong indicators of their health and welfare problems and thus they can be used as input to an early warning system. Many researchers have confirmed that lack of animal locomotion indicates lack of welfare. An automatic cow tracking system can be a solution, which can find the animals with welfare problems or oestrus. A lot of technologies have been used for location and tracking but only some are useable for animal tracking indoors. The possibility of using different indoor positioning systems for cow tracking was investigated. Based on the survey, the solution which uses wireless local area network (WLAN) has been chosen for a test installation. The installation was made to observe a loose housing system with 10 cows. In principle, the system accuracy was good (position accuracy 70% under 1 m) but in the actual case, the measurements were not stable enough. The system has shown its capability for the task but further development is needed before it is possible to use this solution for exact cow tracking. (c) 2006 IAgrE. All rights reserved Published by Elsevier Ltd.