Sensor-based breakage detection for electric fences

Abstract

The human-elephant conflict is one of the most severe natural problems in Sri Lanka. There are rich farmlands near the elephant habitats and elephants raid these farms in search of food. This has been the main cause for nearly 70 human deaths and over 200 elephant deaths that have been recorded each year in the recent past. To manage the problem, the government has initiated projects that secure the national wildlife parks with electric fences. However, maintaining the electric fence is a challenge, because of its large perimeter and the lack of available manpower. A particular concern is that of locating faults in electric fences since these typically span a few hundred miles. Currently, park rangers are required to travel on foot to locate the faults, which could take days to complete. In this paper, we propose a novel system architecture that considerably shortens the maintenance time for electric fences, at minimal and hence affordable cost. Our architecture benefits the park rangers of the national wildlife sanctuaries to detect and repair the breakages.

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare

“…Human-animal cohabitation concerns welfare of wild and feral animals in the areas populated by humans, both in rural and urban areas. A smart system [103] in Sri Lanka was to detect breakages in fences used to keep wild elephants away from humans for the protection of both humans and animals. Similarly, a WSN system that uses passive nodes and infrasonic sounds [104] was deployed in India to deter elephants from crossing railways.…”

Improving Animal-Human Cohabitation with Machine Learning in Fiber-Wireless Networks

“…[18] proposed an interesting solution, which is also profitable, wherein authors employ bees to deter elephants from damaging the vegetation and trees in Africa. A few notable past works [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] have tackled the issues of animal behavior monitoring and proposed technical solutions, mainly warning systems.…”

“…Suman used fiber sensors-buried in the ground (within 2 m depth)-to identify the intruding animals/humans based on the characteristic signature of the intruder (animal/human) that walks over the ground where the fiber sensor is buried [1]. A smart fault detection system [6] was proposed to detect breakages in electric fences, which keeps wild elephants away from humans in order to protect both humans and animals in Sri Lanka. Wireless sensor network (WSN) system has been widely used in the past to deal with the animal-human conflict problem.…”

“…could be added to the smart hot zones near the roads/rails or adjoining areas (to human habitation) to detect the movement of animals and warn humans/vehicles in advance for a likelihood of animals forage. Although there are a few notable works that studied some aspects of the animal-human cohabitation problem [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]], a warning system that could intelligently process data at various layers of networking architecture-from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, e.g., sensors, to fog-to-cloud-has not been integrated into the system. The processing of raw data near sensors can be helpful in some scenarios, where the energy consumption is an issue due to limited source of energy on the end devices.…”

Improving Animal-Human Cohabitation withMachine Learning in Fiber-Wireless Networks

“…[1] used fiber sensors-buried in the ground (within 2 m depth)-to identify the intruding animals/humans based on the characteristic signature of the intruder (animal/human) that walks over the ground where the fiber sensor is buried. A smart fault detection system [6] was proposed to detect breakages in electric fences, which keeps wild elephants away from humans in order to protect both humans and animals in Sri Lanka. Wireless sensor network (WSN) system has been widely used in the past to deal with the animal-human conflict problem.…”