Alignment technology plays an important role in navigation, and is used extensively throughout military and civilian applications. However, the existing in-flight alignment methods cannot be applied to the low-cost based strap-down inertial navigation system/global positioning system integrated navigation system, used in short-endurance and high-speed rotation flight bodies, since they cannot quickly obtain alignment results to meet the accuracy requirements of a flight body with special movement characteristics of short-endurance and high-speed rotation. In this paper, in order to solve this challenging problem of alignment for flight body with short-endurance and high-speed rotation, a fast in-flight alignment method based on the Lie group is proposed. First, an in-flight alignment model based on vector observations was established by using the Lie group. Second, addressing the problem that the alignment accuracy is greatly affected by the low-cost inertial sensor bias, an improved unscented Kalman filter was constructed in the Lie group on the basis of fully considering the characteristics of the system equations to estimate and feedback the correlated errors. Finally, a trajectory simulation of high-speed flight body and field semi-physical test was carried out to evaluate the proposed method. Evaluation of the system performance in comparison with existing state-of-the-art methods indicated that the proposed in-flight alignment method has better alignment accuracy and faster alignment velocity for a low-cost strap-down inertial navigation system/global positioning system integrated navigation system.

With the advancement of deep learning technology, the importance of utilizing deep learning for livestock management is becoming increasingly evident. goat face detection provides a foundation for goat recognition and management. In this study, we proposed a novel neural network specifically designed for goat face object detection, addressing challenges such as low image resolution, small goat face targets, and indistinct features. By incorporating contextual information and feature-fusion complementation, our approach was compared with existing object detection networks using evaluation metrics such as F1-Score (F1), precision (P), recall (R), and average precision (AP). Our results show that there are 8.07%, 0.06, and 6.8% improvements in AP, P, and R, respectively. The findings confirm that the proposed object detection network effectively mitigates the impact of small targets in goat face detection, providing a solid basis for the development of intelligent management systems for modern livestock farms.

In response to the complex animal husbandry environment, wide livestock range, and labor shortage in Inner Mongolia grasslands, this study designed an intelligent control system for robotic vehicles used in natural grazing grassland environments. The control system consists of software and hardware components and motion control algorithms. Based on the application characteristics of different mechanisms of the robotic vehicle, the motion control of the robotic vehicle is decomposed into longitudinal speed control and lateral steering control. The longitudinal speed control adopts the traditional Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) control method. Since the hardware composition and internal angle calculation method of the steering system are complex and prone to deviations caused by external terrain, a lateral adaptive fuzzy PID controller was constructed with lateral deviation and deviation change rate as input variables and parameters $K_p$, $K_i$, and $K_d$ as outputs. The field test results show that when the longitudinal speed was set to 0.5 m/s, the adjustment time was 1.95 s, and the steady-state error was about 0. When the longitudinal speed was the same, the lateral adaptive fuzzy PID controller reduced the rise time by 0.77 s compared to traditional control methods, reduced overshoot and steady-state error by 2%, and quickly recovered to a steady state after being disturbed. The following test results show that the designed intelligent control system can achieve real-time tracking of targets and that the motion controllers can effectively control speed and steering angle. Therefore, the intelligent control system designed in this paper can effectively achieve stable and real-time control of the robotic vehicle.

In order to achieve goat localization to help prevent goats from wandering, we proposed an efficient target localization method based on machine vision. Albas velvet goats from a farm in Ertok Banner, Ordos City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, were the main objects of study. First, we proposed detecting the goats using a shallow convolutional neural network, ShallowSE, with the channel attention mechanism SENet, the GeLU activation function and layer normalization. Second, we designed three fully connected coordinate regression network models to predict the spatial coordinates of the goats. Finally, the target detection algorithm and the coordinate regression algorithm were combined to localize the flock. We experimentally confirmed the proposed method using our dataset. The proposed algorithm obtained a good detection accuracy and successful localization rate compared to other popular algorithms. The overall number of parameters in the target detection algorithm model was only 4.5 M. The average detection accuracy reached 95.89% and the detection time was only 8.5 ms. The average localization error of the group localization algorithm was only 0.94 m and the localization time was 0.21 s. In conclusion, the method achieved fast and accurate localization, which helped to rationalize the use of grassland resources and to promote the sustainable development of rangelands.

As technology advances, rangeland management is rapidly transitioning toward intelligent systems. To optimize grassland resources and implement scientific grazing practices, livestock grazing monitoring has become a pivotal area of research. Traditional methods, such as manual tracking and wearable monitoring, often disrupt the natural movement and feeding behaviors of grazing livestock, posing significant challenges for in-depth studies of grazing patterns. In this paper, we propose a machine vision-based grazing goat herd detection algorithm that enhances the streamlined ELAN module in YOLOv7-tiny, incorporates an optimized CBAM attention mechanism, refines the SPPCSPC module to reduce the parameter count, and improves the anchor boxes in YOLOv7-tiny to enhance target detection accuracy. The BiAF-YOLOv7 algorithm achieves precision, recall, F1 score, and mAP values of 94.5, 96.7, 94.8, and 96.0%, respectively, on the goat herd dataset. Combined with DeepSORT, our system successfully tracks goat herds, demonstrating the effectiveness of the BiAF-YOLOv7 algorithm as a tool for livestock grazing monitoring. This study not only validates the practicality of the proposed algorithm but also highlights the broader applicability of machine vision-based monitoring in large-scale environments. It provides innovative approaches to achieve grass-animal balance through information-driven methods, such as monitoring and tracking.

This paper proposes a design method for a channel-type sheep dynamic weighing system to address the current problems encountered by pastoralists at home and abroad, such as time-consuming sheep weighing, difficulties with data collection, and management of the stress response in sheep. The complete system includes a hardware structure, dynamic characteristics, and a Kalman-aggregate empirical modal decomposition algorithm (Kalman-EEMD algorithm) model for dynamic data processing. The noise suppression effects of the Kalman filter, the empirical modal decomposition (EMD), and the ensemble empirical modal decomposition (EEMD) algorithms are discussed for practical applications. Field tests showed that the Kalman-EEMD algorithm model has the advantages of high accuracy, efficiency, and reliability. The maximum error between the actual weight of the goats and the measured value in the experiments was 1.0%, with an average error as low as 0.40% and a maximum pass time of 2 s for a single goat. This meets the needs for weighing accuracy and goat flock weighing rates.