Abstract
This paper proposes a novel robotic animal herding system based on a network of autonomous barking drones. The objective of such a system is to replace traditional herding methods (e.g., dogs) so that a large number (e.g., thousands) of farm animals such as sheep can be quickly collected from a sparse status and then driven to a designated location (e.g., a sheepfold). In this paper, we particularly focus on the motion control of the barking drones. To this end, a computationally efficient sliding mode based control algorithm is developed, which navigates the drones to track the moving boundary of the animals’ footprint and enables the drones to avoid collisions with others. Extensive computer simulations, where the dynamics of the animals follow Reynolds’ rules, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Highlights
Robot farming plays a critical role in preventing the food crisis caused by future population growth [1]
We propose a collision-free motion control algorithm for a network of barking drones to herd a large flock of farm animals efficiently;
Same as most research on robotic herding [20,27,36], we describe the dynamic of animal flocking by boids model based on Reynolds’ rules [37], which models the interaction of the agents based on attraction, repulsion and alignment models that are common in studies of collective animal behaviour
Summary
Robot farming plays a critical role in preventing the food crisis caused by future population growth [1]. The past decades have seen the rapid development of robotic crop farming, such as automated crop monitoring, harvesting, weed control, and so forth [2,3]. Deploying robotic automation to improve crop production yields has become very popular among farmers. Research and implementations of robotic livestock farming have been mostly restricted in the fields of virtual fencing [4], animal monitoring and pasture surveying [5,6]. Such applications can improve livestock production yields to some extent. Two main obstacles of robotic animal herding systems are: (1) lack of practical robot-to-animal interactions and the suitable robotic herding platform; and (2) lack of efficient robotic herding algorithm for abundant animals
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