This paper presents a water intake monitoring system for animal agriculture that tracks individual animal watering behavior, water quality, and water consumption. The system is deployed in an outdoor environment to reach remote areas. The proposed system integrates motion detectors, cameras, water level sensors, flow meters, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, and water temperature sensors. The data collection and control are performed using Arduino microcontrollers with custom-designed circuit boards. The data associated with each drinking event are water consumption, water temperature, drinking duration, animal identification, and pictures. The data and pictures are automatically stored on Secure Digital (SD) cards. The prototypes are deployed in a remote grazing site located in Tucumcari, New Mexico, USA. The system can be used to perform water consumption and watering behavior studies of both domestic animals and wild animals. The current system automatically records the drinking behavior of 29 cows in a two-week duration in the remote ranch.

Machine learning is an expanding field with an ever-increasing role in everyday life, with its utility in the industrial, agricultural, and medical sectors being undeniable. Recently, this utility has come in the form of machine learning implementation on embedded system devices. While there have been steady advances in the performance, memory, and power consumption of embedded devices, most machine learning algorithms still have a very high power consumption and computational demand, making the implementation of embedded machine learning somewhat difficult. However, different devices can be implemented for different applications based on their overall processing power and performance. This paper presents an overview of several different implementations of machine learning on embedded systems divided by their specific device, application, specific machine learning algorithm, and sensors. We will mainly focus on NVIDIA Jetson and Raspberry Pi devices with a few different less utilized embedded computers, as well as which of these devices were more commonly used for specific applications in different fields. We will also briefly analyze the specific ML models most commonly implemented on the devices and the specific sensors that were used to gather input from the field. All of the papers included in this review were selected using Google Scholar and published papers in the IEEExplore database. The selection criterion for these papers was the usage of embedded computing systems in either a theoretical study or practical implementation of machine learning models. The papers needed to have provided either one or, preferably, all of the following results in their studies—the overall accuracy of the models on the system, the overall power consumption of the embedded machine learning system, and the inference time of their models on the embedded system. Embedded machine learning is experiencing an explosion in both scale and scope, both due to advances in system performance and machine learning models, as well as greater affordability and accessibility of both. Improvements are noted in quality, power usage, and effectiveness.

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