Queensland based agricultural IoT startup Ceres Tag is to trial 500 of its cattle-monitoring ear tags on cattle belonging to pastoral company Caason Group on its 400,000 hectare Aileron Pastoral Holdings property 135km north of Alice Springs
The two have signed a MoU for the trial, following Caason becoming an investor in Ceres Tag. Caason says that, if successful, this trial will trigger pre-commercial sales of thousands of Ceres Tag smart ear tags to Aileron Pastoral Holdings.
The Ceres Tag — developed with CSIRO and its IT R&D arm, Data 61 — enables the location, movement and temperature of the cow to be continuously monitored remotely.
The MoU follows completion of second stage prototype trials at the CSIRO Lansdown research station near Townsville that were completed in June.
According to Ceres Tag founder and CEO, David Smith, a key feature that differentiates Ceres Tag from the many other cattle monitoring tags on the market or under development is that Ceres Tag is fully compliant with the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) because its battery does not need replacing: the device is designed to last for the life of the beast to which it is attached.
The trial is part of a research and development partnerships with Meat & Livestock Australia Donor Company and Advance Queensland. CSIRO, Data61 and James Cook University also have technology development collaboration agreements with Ceres Tag.
James Cook University says it has been awarded an Advance Queensland Innovation Partnerships (AQIP) to investigate a machine learning approach to terrestrial based geolocation with CSIRO for Ceres Tag.
“While time of arrival triatelation* is a well understood approach, our system will correct multipathing errors by applying machine learning neural networks using real time fixed location and environmental data,” it says. “We will focus on freely available spectrum to reduce cost to end users, with location resolution of 30 meters and a range in excess of 10 km.”
Caason says the trial will test the full range of Ceres Tag’s capability including GPS position, temperature and motion monitoring. Smith told IoTAustralia that both terrestrial and satellite communications technologies would be used for the trial, but details were yet to finalised and would be announced in due course.
Trials are expected to commence in April 2019 in line with the requirements of Ceres Tag’s Meat & Livestock Australia Donor Company R&D funding agreement, and will form part of the final testing and verification of the Ceres Tag smart ear tags prior to commercial production and sales.
Caason said: “Objectives of the trial cover testing on a range of cattle types, durability of the tag in a desert/semi-arid climate, software testing and traceability herd movement data analysis. The benefits are economic, environmental and social; and are expected to include improved animal health, theft reduction and land use efficiency.”
* We don’t know what trialetation is. Google could offer only one reference to the word other than its use in connection with Ceres Tag.
I spelt it wrong in the footnote. The correct word is in the text: triatelation
Re “trialetation”, I imagine it is meant to be “trilateration”.