Measurement of horses gaits using geo-sensors

The aim of this thesis is to determine the horse’s gait types using the acceleration values measured from the horse. A measurement was taken in Gävletravet, a total of five Nanotrak sensors were used, four on the different parts of the horse, and one on the hand of the horse’s driver, a car was dri...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Qin, Xuefei
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för elektronik, matematik och naturvetenskap 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-17769
Description
Summary:The aim of this thesis is to determine the horse’s gait types using the acceleration values measured from the horse. A measurement was taken in Gävletravet, a total of five Nanotrak sensors were used, four on the different parts of the horse, and one on the hand of the horse’s driver, a car was driven parallel to the horse and the motions of the horse was recorded by a camera in order to synchronize with the data measured by the sensors, a total of four videos were recorded. The software to process the data was Matlab R2010b, and the methods to analyze them were Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), and Least Squares (LS). Different window functions were tried when applying the STFT, and the Hanning window was the best to smooth the curves, different window sizes (or data length) were also tried, the data length of 512 was found to be the most proper value. The methods for classification of horse’s gaits included amplitude, ratio, and LS. The method of amplitude worked well for the first three videos except for the last one, and performed better than the other two. The method of ratio was more reliable, but the results were not satisfactory. The method of LS gave bad results, so it was not trustworthy. More measurements and more analysis needed to be done in the future to find a proper way to automatic determine the horse’s gaits, and the use of modern technology will be very popular in other fields like animal science.