Desenvolvimento de sistema para avaliação do comportamento ingestivo de ruminantes a partir de um conjunto de sensores

Abstract

The usage of technology and good practices in cattle breeding has lead to a significant increase in brazilians livestock productivity. Understanding these animals ingestive behaviours grants the producer health and well being indicatives, which can be used in order to increase the cattle productivity and longevity. In the latest years, many researchers have been using automatic identification methods to analyze the cattle ingestive behaviour, ir order to describe grazing, rumination and idle periods. However, most of theese works show difficulty on the rumination periods identification, caused by the acquisition method’s limitations. This work proposes the development of an acquisition system based on an approach using two different types of sensor, inertial and pressure, in order to overcome the other works limitations in rumination periods identification. Thereunto, an inertial and pressure sensor based system was designed. The system is also equipped with a microcontroller, responsible for the sensors’ command, data recording and handling, an external was battery used to feed the circuit, granting the set’s portability. The system was placed inside in a plastic project box and attached to an halter, which made possible to implement tests in confined animals. Firstly, bench tests were performed, in order to evaluate the acquisition system’s operational behaviour, later it was possible to test the circuit in isolated animals, providing data that was later analyzed graphically, which made possible to differ periods when the animal was chewing with its head pointing upwards and downwards, indicating the system’s capability on identifying rumination periods.