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Using Drones to tackle Cattle Rustling

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Cattle Rustling

Cattle rustling is the IDEAL USE CASE for the AERIAL and MOBILITY ADVANTAGES drones provide. Stock theft in Kenya and around the world tends to happen in more remote areas where access and monitoring is more difficult for terrestrial based operations, whether by foot or vehicle and line of sight could be obscured by obstacles.

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Cattle Production in Kenya

Official estimates by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics show that the human population presently stands at 47 million and is projected to grow to 96million by 2050 - pilling pressure on food supplies.

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Cattle Rustling or just Stock Theft and Capitalism?

Cattle rustling is no longer a form of rural petty theft or a cultural practice but has become fully fledged organized crime committed by international criminal networks. Around 10 - 60 heads of cattle are stolen per incident. That is about $2500 per head, equating to $25000 - $150,000 per incident.

Cross-border criminal networks use advanced logistics and market information to inform their illicit activities. In one 2017 incident, Kenya’s Laikipia County, about 10,000 pastoralists with automatic rifles made off with 135,000 heads of cattle

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Existing Methods to tackle Cattle Rustling

  1. Use of RFID Chips and GPS Trackers. GPS jamming is a big issue when it comes to using RFID Chips and GPS Trackers can fail when cows are in very remote locations.
  2. Advanced GPS and Satellite Tracking. Expensive and time consuming to set up especially when a farmer has thousands of cattle as they would have to be ear tagged with bluetooth tags.
  3. Thermal Imaging Cameras. Location of cattle across a broad range of landscapes.

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Here is where we come in!!

Prometheus Smart Farm AI is an assistant designed for smart activities in a range of farm management tasks. Some key performance metrics need to be met.

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Key Drone Perfomance Metrics for the Drone.

  1. A drone that flies at least 60km/h, has a 30 minute outbound flight that provides a striking range of 30km totalling the area covered to 2600km2 or 260,000ha (striking range is the radius) Keep in mind the maximum distance a cow walks is around 1.5km in 30 minutes.

The faster the drone, the longer the striking range hence the larger the area the drone covers.

  • A drone that is hackable, meaning that it can provides an SDK where we shall install prometheus ai.

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How Prometheus Works.

On detecting cattle rustling activity(Through Machine Vision), prometheus informs the owner of the activity and starts the pursuit of the cattle rustlers. With hand tracking technology, the system detects the weapons carried by the cattle rustlers and employs proper counter measures like evasive maneuvers and flies at higher altitudes.

The drone can also be equipped with a custom automatic rifle that can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition and be used to neutralize targets designated as hostile but only on approval by the owner(also depending on country laws and personal ethics).

The drone then ensures that it has enough battery for the return flight to the base station where it automatically recharges on landing.A second drone is then dispatched automatically before the other drone starts returning in order to ensure that the trail of the cattle rustlers doesn’t go cold. The major problem with traditional methods of combating this issue is normally because by the time the authorities respond, the people responsible are long gone.