Ultra-Wideband Radar-Based Sensing Poultry Litter Moisture Content Monitoring System

High litter moisture content (LMC) in poultry houses is a primary driver of footpad dermatitis, elevated ammonia emissions, and bacterial proliferation. These conditions directly compromise broiler welfare and productivity. Existing monitoring methods, including oven-drying, contact-based sensors, and near-infrared spectroscopy, suffer from invasiveness, single-point limitation, or surface-only measurement. This study investigates ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radar as a non-contact sensing modality for estimating the LMC of cedar wood shaving bedding under controlled laboratory conditions. A four-phase experimental program was conducted. Phases 1–3 characterized signal–moisture relationships across 0–50% LMC, manure simulant contamination, and bedding structural changes (loose, compacted, caked). Phase 4 tested whether UWB radar can estimate litter LMC when a stationary broiler body obstructs the beam under combined contamination and structural conditions. A progressive feature engineering approach and an SVC-gated mixture-of-experts regression architecture were used to address each confounding factor. Full technical details are provided in the Methods Section. Under clean conditions, the baseline model achieved R2=0.97 and RMSE = 2.48% LMC. Under combined realistic conditions (manure contamination, caked bedding, centered carcass), the full pipeline achieved R2=0.91 and RMSE = 4.53% LMC, with 98.8% bird detection accuracy from the radar signal alone. These laboratory findings suggest that the UWB radar can sense litter moisture through a stationary broiler body. The results support its potential as the sensing core of a non-contact monitoring system for precision poultry farming.