Automated tracking of indoor housed farm animals is gaining an increasing interest in farming practice and research for monitoring animal behaviour and health. Several positioning solutions have become commercially available for different animal species, but the insight on how these systems perform in pig facilities is still limited. In this study the feasibility of tracking sows in a barn using an ultra-wideband (UWB) based indoor positioning system was investigated. The system consisted of 7 base stations and multiple tracker tags, and the determination of tags' positions was based on time of arrival (ToA). For locating stationary tags the system achieved 0.37 m accuracy at 1 m height and 0.50 m accuracy at 0.3 m height. While tracking moving tags at 1 m height 0.38 m accuracy was achieved. Three filters were tested to further improve the positioning performance. The median filter had the highest improvement on locating stationary and moving tags. The bilateral filter had a balanced capability of uncovering complex moving trajectories. The double exponential moving average filter was more suited when real-time updates were required. The overall results showed that tracking group housed sows inside a pig barn was feasible using the UWB positioning system.

对室内饲养的家畜的自动跟踪对养殖实践和监测动物行为和健康的研究越来越感兴趣。几种定位解决方案已经可以用于不同的动物品种，但是对于这些系统如何在猪场中运行的见识仍然有限。在这项研究中，研究了使用基于超宽带（UWB）的室内定位系统跟踪谷仓中母猪的可行性。该系统由7个基站和多个跟踪器标签组成，标签位置的确定基于到达时间（ToA）。为了定位固定标签，系统在1 m高度处的精度为0.37 m，在0.3 m高度处的精度为0.50 m。在高度为1 m的位置跟踪移动标签时，精度为0.38 m。测试了三个滤波器，以进一步提高定位性能。中值滤波器在定位固定标签和移动标签方面的改进最大。双边过滤器具有发现复杂运动轨迹的平衡能力。当需要实时更新时，双指数移动平均滤波器更适合。总体结果表明，使用UWB定位系统对猪舍内的母猪进行追踪分组是可行的。