Anti-Adaptive Harmful Birds Repelling Method Based on Reinforcement Learning Approach

Cheol Won Lee,Young-Ae Kwon,Deayoung Na,Hyung-Jun Oh,Sung-Phil Heo,Heung Seok Jeon,Azamjon Muminov,Jun Dong Lee,Myeong-Cheol Ko

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3073205

Abstract

To prevent crop damage from harmful birds, various repelling methods have been studied. However, harmful birds are still causing damage in the orchard by adapting to the repelling device according to their biological characteristics. This paper proposes a method called Anti-adaptive Harmful Birds Repelling (AHBR) that uses the model-free learning idea of the Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to repell harmful birds that can effectively prevent bird adaptation problems. To prevent adaptation, the AHBR method uses a method of learning the bird’s reaction to the available threat sounds and playing them in patterns that are difficult to adapt through the RL approach. We also proposed the Long-term and Short-term (LaS) policy to meet the Markov assumptions that make RL difficult to implement in the real world. The LaS policy enable learning of the actual bird’s reaction to the sound of a threat. The performance of the AHBR method was evaluated in a closed environment to experiment real harmful bird such as Brown-eared Bulbul, Great Tit, and Eurasian Magpie captured in orchards. Results obtained from the experiment showed that the AHBR method was on average 43.5% better than the threat sound patterns(One, Sequential, Reverse Sequential, Random) used in commercial products.

Highlights

Most orchards are located outdoors to meet the environmental and space requirements for the survival of fruit trees
We propose Anti-adaptation Harmful Birds Repelling (AHBR) scheme that finds the optimal threat sound pattern that makes adaptation difficult by determining the reaction of harmful birds based on the Long-term and Short-term (LaS) policy and rewarding according to the determined reaction using Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL)
In this paper, we proposed the adaptive Harmful Birds Repelling (AHBR) method based on the RL approach

Summary

Introduction

Most orchards are located outdoors to meet the environmental and space requirements for the survival of fruit trees. Birds living around orchards naturally flock to orchards rich in food. For this reason, orchards suffer from the harmful bird around them every year. Repelling harmful birds since humans began farming is an important research topic. The various bird repeller researches for protecting farms by harmful birds have been studied from the traditional methods (scarecrow, kite, balloon) to the modern methods (sound gun, sonic repeller, sound repeller), as shown in Fig. 2 [1]

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion