Evaluation of drift correction strategies for an inertial based dairy cow positioning system. : A study on tracking the position of dairy cows using a foot mounted IMU with drift correction from ZUPT or sparse RFID locations.

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates the feasibility and performance of an inertial based positioning system for dairy cows in a barn environment. The investigated positioning method is pedestrian dead reckoning using inertial navigation with MEMS sensors. While this method is well known for human positioning applications, there has not been a lot of studies of its use on terrestrial animals. Since inertial based positioning systems are dependent on drift correction, the focus of the research is drift correction methods. Two methods, zero velocity update (ZUPT) and sparse locations, are compared with regards to positioning accuracy, energy consumption and sensor placement.  The best positioning estimates are achieved by using ZUPT corrections at a sample rate of 10 Hz, resulting in a mean position drift of 0.2145 m=m. Using a proposed equidistant sample time based sleep mode scheme, this would require a theoretical supply current of 0.21 mA. It is also seen that better position estimates are obtained for sensors that are placed low and on the front legs. The sparse locations method suffers from severe position drift between the locations, resulting in unusable positioning data. A combination of ZUPT and sparse location yields less accurate positioning than ZUPT only.