46 An Engineers Perspective on Sensor Development and Future Applications in Livestock

Sensors are essential to collect a wide range of high-fidelity and reproducible data from livestock farms. On one hand, commercial cameras are capable of recording large videos for post-processing and analysis on edge computers. On the other hand, a variety of electronic sensors and microprocessor chips are commercially available to track the posture and movement of animals in livestock farms. There are inherent tradeoffs in developing and adopting the above sensors, including issues with handling the big data, effective noise filtering, computing at the edge, on-farm resiliency, power usage, and infrastructure costs. In this talk, we will discuss these tradeoffs while understanding the needs of different livestock farms in the context of our research in sensor technologies.