Computer system for measuring real time position of a plurality of animals

• US 10,234,535 B2
• Filed: 10/28/2013
• Issued: 03/19/2019
• Est. Priority Date: 10/31/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: GEA Farm Technologies GmbH (GEA Group AG)
• Original Assignee: GEA Farm Technologies GmbH (GEA Group AG)
• Inventors: Sloth, Karen Helle, Frederiksen, Daniel
• Primary Examiner(s): Brainard, Timothy A
• Application Number:
  US14/439,190
• Publication Number:
  US 20150293205A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,968 Days
• Field of Search: 342451
• CPC Class Codes: A01K 15/023 Anti-evasion devices
• CPC Class Codes: A01K 29/005 Monitoring or measuring activity, e.g. detecting heat or mating
• CPC Class Codes: G01S 2205/01 specially adapted for specific applications
• CPC Class Codes: G01S 5/021 Calibration, monitoring or correction G01S5/0252 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G01S 5/14 Determining absolute distances from a plurality of spaced points of known location

Abstract

The present invention relates to a computer system for measuring real time position of a plurality of animals, which system receives input from a plurality of sensors, communicating with at least tags carried by the animals, which system based of measurement of delay in radio communication calculates the actual position of the animals. It is the first object of the invention to achieve real time position of animals in a limited area. A further object is based of the real time position to analyze the behavior of each of the animals. The sensors further performs communication with a plurality of reference tags, and performs a calibration of the real time position measured by the system, which system comprises a CPU with at least two cores, which system divides the data processing in a first real time position processing in the first core of the processor, and into a second processing of the activity of the animals performed in the second core of the processor. By using fixed reference tags together with tags, it the computer system performs an automatic calibration of all received signals from animals.

Claims

1. An animal position sensing system for measuring real time positions of a plurality of animals, the system comprising:

a plurality of sensors;

a plurality of radio receiver/transmitter tags and each receiver/transmitter tag is carried by one of the plurality of animals;

a delay measuring device in radio communication between the radio receiver/transmitter tags and the sensors to calculate the actual position of each animal with a receiver/transmitter tag, wherein the sensors further communicate with a plurality of reference radio receiver/transmitter tags, to calibrate the real time position measured by the system and a Central Processing Unit (CPU) having at least two cores, and the system divides the data processing in a first real time position processing in the first core of the processor, and into a second processing of the activity of the animals in the second core of the processor.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the input for measurement of the real time position is performed by a Real Time Location System (RTLS).

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the first CPU core includes a quick noise reduction algorithm for generating a display of an animal position overview.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the system uses the second CPU core to perform noise reduction analysis of the data to analyze the activity of the animals.

5. The system of claim 3, wherein data is received from an interface to the RTLS, and a timestamp is applied to each piece of data.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the sensors provide position data to a First-In-First-Out stack, where the oldest measurements are processed first.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the system processes a plurality of strings of location information at the same time, in a predetermined number of parallel processing threads in a configuration file.

8. An animal position sensing system for measuring real time positions of a plurality of animals, the system comprising:

a plurality of sensors;

a plurality of radio receiver/transmitter tags carried by the plurality of animals;

a measuring device for measurement of delay in radio communication between the radio receiver/transmitter tags and the sensors to calculate the actual position of each animal with a receiver/transmitter tag, wherein the sensors further communicate with a plurality of reference radio receiver/transmitter tags, and the system measures the position for the reference radio receiver/transmitter tags to perform a calibration, which system comprises a Central Processing Unit having at least two cores, and the system divides the data processing a first real time position in the first core of the processor, and a second processing of the activity of the animals performed in the second core of the processor;

wherein the sensors provide position data to a First-In-First-Out stack, where the oldest measurements are processed first;

wherein the system processes several strings of location information at the same time, in a predetermined-number of parallel processing threads in a configuration file, and the system further comprises;

a Movement Module, which receives time stamped Real Time Location positioning data, and generates an output as a point with a zone attribute, and the Movement Module comprises noise reduction filters including Median and Exponentially Weighted Moving Average.

9. The system of claim 8, and further compromising:

a cluster module defined by an aggregated set of location points where the points calculated by the Movement Module are aggregated into a cluster if they are within a predetermined range of positions at a predetermined range of time.

10. The system of claim 9, and further comprising:

an Activity module that defines at least the following;

1;

At the watering trough

2. At the feeding table

3;

In bed

4;

Out definitive

5;

Walk

6;

Standing

7;

Unknown.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the activity module accumulates activity data for each animal, and the Activity module analyses an animal'"'"'s current behavior compared to the same animal'"'"'s past behavior to set an alarm for high or low activity, wherein for the high activity alarm the current behavior is calculated based on a relatively short time frame, whereas the low activity alarm is raised based on the behavior during a longer time period, where normal animal behavior is calculated over an even longer time period spanning a plurality of days.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the system comprises a Kalman filter, that combines animal position parameters selected from the group:

prediction of the animal position and possible animal speed;

to perform an estimate of the animal position and the measurements are combined as a weighted average.

13. The system of claim 12, and further comprising:

a Central Backend computer system that performs a number of specific tasks for calculation of animal data.

14. The system of claim 13, wherein the Central Backend computer system handles an ADIS request used for integration with one or more defined Dairy Plans, and generates a plurality of ADIS requests.

15. The system of claim 14, wherein the Central Backend computer system generates ADIS requests as needed, and where at least two requests are generated for each installation, the first of these is a request for all historical data and the second is a request for the current state.