2020 SmartFence - Development of a self-maintaining, digital fence system to promote grazing.

The SmartFence Project aims to promote grazing by developing a self-maintaining, digital fence system. The potential benefits of grazing for animal welfare, climate and environmental protection and efficient resource consumption, are vastly underutilized. Obstacles are mainly increased labor costs of grazing, especially for maintenance of fences. SmartFence compensates this disadvantage and continues to fully automate grazing. The system to be developed will have a) special fencing material designed for optimal recognition with computer vision (cv) techniques; b) an intelligent upgrade module, consisting of a master unit and several measuring units which continuously monitor the voltage on the fence in real time, detect failure more reliably than any existing system and localizes them; c) an autonomous patrol and maintenance vehicle that moves out periodically and in case of failures, navigates along the fence, recognizes and documents the fence's condition, exactly locates the position of a failure, notifies the user and regulates ingrowing vegetation; d) a central server with a graphic user interface (GUI) that allows users to control the system and allows communication between SmartFence devices.

responsible: Carsten Bruckhaus, Dr. habil. Abozar Nasirahmadi