9 ms·

Barking drones used on farms instead of sheep dogs

103 points by howard941 8y ago

samcday 8y ago
> The latest drone model, the $3500 DJI Mavic Enterprise, can record sounds and play them over a speaker - allowing a dog's bark, or other noises, to be loudly projected across a paddock. Ok so basically it's just an off-the-shelf drone with a big speaker on top making barking noises. The most clever solutions are the simplest ones :) In my mind the next logical step would be AI that pilots the drones autonomously, managing location of herds of animals to balance various objectives. I'm not much of a rancher, so I don't know what those would be. But if I had to hazard a guess, rotating where the herd grazes, keeping them safe, bringing them into pens during certain periods. I remember reading years ago that there was some project to autonomously milk cows. The cows were taught to go into a special milking stall when they were ready to be milked. Each cow was RFID'd and even had their own Twitter handle that was posted to each time the cow was milked. Modern John Deere machinery all but runs itself. Modern combine harvesters are outfitted with GPS and the person "operating it" is basically sitting in there watching the sportsball or whatever. It's kinda surreal when you step back and look at the trajectory. It's easy to picture, in the not too distant future, farms that are run entirely autonomously, with only light direct intervention performed remotely from C&C centers in a nice comfy air-conditioned office in downtown Manhattan. I wonder how much longer it would take before some kind of mass human extinction event doesn't even impact the agriculture ecosystem? I'm imaging this bizarre dystopia where the machines rose up, killed all the humans, and then settled down to produce countless tonnes of animal and vegetable produce in peace. Sure, there's none of those pesky humans around to consume it, but the AI wasn't optimized for that purpose - it just wants to produce as much and as efficiently as possible.
- jacobush 8y ago
  A case of the paperclip maximizer. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
- Lukas_Skywalker 8y ago
  The autonomous milking robots are actually already in wide use for about a decade. There is even already an aftermarket for used milking robots in Europe. As far as I know they first fisinfect and then milk the cows. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnNGPsVdYSA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnNGPsVdYSA
- platz 8y ago
  So like interstellar
- gwern 8y ago
  > I remember reading years ago that there was some project to autonomously milk cows. The cows were taught to go into a special milking stall when they were ready to be milked. Each cow was RFID'd and even had their own Twitter handle that was posted to each time the cow was milked. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/technology/farm-technology-milkers-robots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/technology/farm-technolog...
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Why would anyone choose to live in Manhattan when their job is entirely remote?
  - CPLX 8y ago
    Because the rest of their life isn’t entirely remote.
  - deanalevitt 8y ago
    I was living in NYC, working remotely for a few years when that exact question hit me. A few months later I was in Hawaii.
  - baddox 8y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean. New York City is famously regarded as a great city for music, art, museums, theatre, cinema, comedy, architecture, food, nightlife, cultural diversity, and more. I have never heard the sentiment “my NYC job is so great, I just wish it were in another town.”
    - pizza 8y ago
      Rent is too damn high
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      High rent like pizza said as well as crowdedness, having to choose between transit and driving in really bad traffic, general city complaints. I've used the subways in NYC a few times and I really wouldn't like having to do that all the time. There is some great stuff there like the Museum of Natural History but I think I'd rather live in a surrounding suburb or something, or Hawaii like the other commenter suggested. On the transit subject, the lack of car reliance is nice in theory, but I honestly found my short experience of taking MTA subways around less enjoyable than driving. Very crowded, jerked so hard when it started moving that I almost fell over, and the walks between connections can be tiring if there's a rush to get there on time or it's a long distance (or both - running from one side of the PABT to the other isn't fun when you're not in great shape)
  - 8y ago
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > I'm not much of a rancher, so I don't know what those would be. Rotating pasture, making sure the cattle does not run away, assembling them for vaccination. Those are things that people can not do reliably on large scale, but surveillance and guide drones coupled with rfid tags can easily. I guess the largest current bottleneck is drone time on the air and maintenance.
- baddox 8y ago
  It seems like a wheeled or tracked drone would be much simpler and more reliable for herding sheep.
  - titanomachy 8y ago
    I don't think there's anything that moves fast enough yet (over varied terrain).
  - abraae 8y ago
    That is definitely not the case, at least not in NZ. This is the kind of terrain you might see:http://woolshed1.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-zealand-agricultural-history.html http://woolshed1.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-zealand-agricultur... If you got up close you'd find land slips, cracks, fallen trees and sheep shit. A wheeled vehicle would need to be at least the size of a quad bike.
mseidl 8y ago
Given how loud rotors are of flying quad copters this seems... it seems like this might be not that good.
- allannienhuis 8y ago
  dogs barking at animals at close range is pretty darn loud. Much of the time the drone is pretty high up, which is relatively quiet at ground level. Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big concern. That said, I think like many things, if reducing sound levels is important then over time it will be addressed - seems like it would be a good application of active noise dampening.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    > Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big concern. Animals are quite sensitive to noise.
    - allannienhuis 8y ago
      that's true.
sharky_sharkDog 8y ago
I have seen the nightmare hellscape of the future, and it is a drone made to behave like Sharky the shark dog.
nmstoker 8y ago
Good to be pushing the limits etc etc, but is this really at all close to being practical yet? Just think of the scale of NZ farms vs the DJI range. Unless they can land on remote charging stations dotted about the terrain it's going to run out of power far too quickly to explore much of the farm aside from a brief flyover. Back of the envelope calc: if an avg NZ farm is 252 hectares [2], and we charitably assume it's square and it's about 6.3km for a trip round the perimeter, yet the DJI flies for 31 minutes at 25kph [1], so roughly 13km, it could only do ~two laps (without stopping and presumably not accounting for cross winds) It gets worse if the farm isn't square (as seems likely in NZ terrain) and it gets much worse when you considering that livestock farms are bigger still than the overall average. [1] https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info [2] http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/ http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  I think the technology is still useful as it is. I think normally farmers wouldn’t take a sheepdog all the way around the perimeter of a farm like that. Instead they would drive to the part where the sheepdog is needed and do the work there. One would imagine a drone would be useful in this scenario too. I think the main advantage with the current limited range would be for driving animals (something that wouldn’t routinely require high speed or long distances but might take a long time) and more localised surveys. I can certainly imagine eg taking the quad bike to different parts of the farm and just sending the drone up to look at/round up the sheep.
- taneq 8y ago
  I don't think they'd try to patrol the entire property on a single battery. More likely just fly out to do a spot check, return to base, swap batteries, etc. If your options are ride a quad bike out there (navigating terrain, fences etc.) or fly straight there and back at 60km/h+ I imagine the drone is a far quicker way to keep an eye on things. You can keep a Spark in the air almost indefinitely (only landing to swap batteries) with three batteries if you don't mind charging them while they're hot (shortens the battery life a bit) so I'd imagine a Mavic Pro would be able to do as well or better.
jobigoud 8y ago
Surely sheeps haven't evolved to respond specifically to dogs barking?
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  Most living sheep probably do know what a dogs bark sounds like, however
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Would they respond similarly to a DJI blasting Slayer music? That would make me move, at least!
    - dan-robertson 8y ago
      I’m not sure. Here’s some evidence that it doesn’t always work for cows: https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        HAAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH thank you so much for this, it was exactly what I was looking for... truly the empirical evidence we need. Needs more shrill screaming and the amplifier needs to be roboticized to run circles around them, of course.
pixelpoet 8y ago
I was already on the fence about replacing humans with robots for e.g. driving, but dogs? Why would anyone want to replace dogs with robots? Worst trade ever.
- executivetech 8y ago
  Dogs cost a lot to maintain, think about Vet expense and Food. Lithium batteries simply need electricity.
  - mhh__ 8y ago
    How many dogs can you buy for the price of one drone? And what if it rains etc. Etc.
    - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
      Trained sheep dogs are £2k-5k Annual costs are around £500-1k They also require a significant time investment when not working.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lelf 8y ago
    Dogs don’t require charging every 20–30 minutes. Dogs can fly^Wrun without remote control.
    - allannienhuis 8y ago
      The dog's remote control is the whistle. :) I expect that at some point the utility of the robot/drone will outpace the utility of the dog in this role (and others). Wanting to hang on to our dogs isn't a bad thing, but I don't think we will be able to make as many arguments based on their utility. Instead we'll just have to accept the idea that the reasons for having them (and even working with them) will be cultural/emotional instead, which are perfectly good reasons. We have an Australian Shepherd as a family pet - they're amazing companions!
alex_duf 8y ago
Looks like a solution in search of a problem.
vamos_davai 8y ago
Oh no how could anyone foresee this happening? We don’t UBI for dogs!
- dmix 8y ago
  Indeed but if it’s anything like other social activist issues there will be far more people worried about the (cuter) animals than the stuff that affects humans.
- vinayan3 8y ago
  I know your comment is a joke but, if drones become a thing for herding then we'll just see less sheep dogs bred. This happened with sheep in the US after WW2. Other fibers had been introduced into the market which reduced wool demand.
erikig 8y ago
I really enjoyed watching the aerial video of the sheep and cattle, it was just sooo satisfying. I've been tinkering with ProcessingJS's Flocking visualizations and the similarity is striking: https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html
walrus01 8y ago
The drone in the picture has a maximum 27 minute flight time, and requires manually changing batteries, manually launching it. Not exactly something you'd want to sit around doing all day. Livestock guardians do not necessarily have to be dogs. Three llamas living with a herd of sheep will provide a great deal of defense against coyotes and mountain lions.
- robocat 8y ago
  > Livestock guardians This is New Zealand. The only thing that eats mammals here (apart from the local humans) is Austrosimulium (australense or ungulatum).
- joshvm 8y ago
  There's also a quote in the article about the farmer sitting indoors on a miserable day flying the drone. Firstly, it's unlikely it would be safe to fly in rain and or high wind. Secondly, in most countries it's illegal to fly beyond line of sight without a lot of paperwork (which basically nobody except the military, possibly law enforcement, and some large companies have). You would need to be in the field, watching the drone.
ohazi 8y ago
Just so that everybody is on the same page: https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8 https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8 The bar for sheep herding robots is ridiculously high. Border Collies are super smart.
- phillc73 8y ago
  Thank you. My first thought when reading this was that sheep dogs, the really good ones, don't typically bark. They are very patient and quiet. Barking is likely to send the sheep in the wrong direction. I owned a working cattle dog once (when I worked on a farm with cattle) and this dog did bark, too much! She wasn't a very good working dog because she'd spook the cattle with the barking. Ultimately, I'm not convinced a "barking" drone is really going to be very effective.
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  Obligatory: https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM (Welsh herdsmen put lights on sheep and play “pong” on a sloped hillside after dusk with the help of border collies.)
  - dTal 8y ago
    That's incredibly impressive. I knew that sheepdogs were good but that level of control is unreal.
    - TimTheTinker 8y ago
      You should check out videos of sheepdog trial finalists. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354 Pretty impressive and fun to watch.
robotresearcher 8y ago
For history buffs, here’s a robot autonomously collecting ducks in a limited arena in 1998. Was the first autonomous robot sheepdog, I believe. Ducks are slower and cheaper than sheep, and flock very nicely as the video shows. https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM
FailMore 8y ago
Sad. I like dogs.
hotcrossbunny 8y ago
NZ cracked the robot sheepdog back in the 70s https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko
- robocat 8y ago
  I think that was actually using stolen Australian technology.
robocat 8y ago
Here's the 4m news video embedded in the article: https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU I love the way the sheep look like schools of fish (especially when they are on fast-mo).
laxd 8y ago
How about just getting a god damn dog you lazy ass imbeciles.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
failrate 8y ago
As someone who grew upon a (hobby)sheep farm, this seems to miss the point. A good sheep dog is already an autonomous "drone". How autonomous? Mild example: our collie would frequently herd the sheep into the barn even before we realized the weather was turning. Extreme example: a Great Pyrenees moved into our farm from a neighboring farm that didn't have any herd animals. The neighbors just gave us the dog after the third time it moved in to our farm.
hbarka 8y ago
Poor sheep. They will have nightmares from the high-decibel drone of a drone. Will probably start getting genetic changes in their wool from the stress. Why disturb nature with that buzzing annoyance?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
misard 8y ago
I heard about this method, but tried only on the advice of a friend…And what can I say...It's really COOL and WORKS! This is a real breakthrough in training and rehabilitating dogs! It helped us solve a lot of the standard problems with our dog and I highly recommend it to everyone! But trust me, the method is worth to buy Check this site, you'll like it: https://tinyurl.com/dogbestbehavior https://tinyurl.com/dogbestbehavior

103 points by howard941 8y ago

> The latest drone model, the $3500 DJI Mavic Enterprise, can record sounds and play them over a speaker - allowing a dog's bark, or other noises, to be loudly projected across a paddock. Ok so basically it's just an off-the-shelf drone with a big speaker on top making barking noises. The most clever solutions are the simplest ones :) In my mind the next logical step would be AI that pilots the drones autonomously, managing location of herds of animals to balance various objectives. I'm not much of a rancher, so I don't know what those would be. But if I had to hazard a guess, rotating where the herd grazes, keeping them safe, bringing them into pens during certain periods. I remember reading years ago that there was some project to autonomously milk cows. The cows were taught to go into a special milking stall when they were ready to be milked. Each cow was RFID'd and even had their own Twitter handle that was posted to each time the cow was milked. Modern John Deere machinery all but runs itself. Modern combine harvesters are outfitted with GPS and the person "operating it" is basically sitting in there watching the sportsball or whatever. It's kinda surreal when you step back and look at the trajectory. It's easy to picture, in the not too distant future, farms that are run entirely autonomously, with only light direct intervention performed remotely from C&C centers in a nice comfy air-conditioned office in downtown Manhattan. I wonder how much longer it would take before some kind of mass human extinction event doesn't even impact the agriculture ecosystem? I'm imaging this bizarre dystopia where the machines rose up, killed all the humans, and then settled down to produce countless tonnes of animal and vegetable produce in peace. Sure, there's none of those pesky humans around to consume it, but the AI wasn't optimized for that purpose - it just wants to produce as much and as efficiently as possible.

jacobush 8y ago
A case of the paperclip maximizer. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Lukas_Skywalker 8y ago
The autonomous milking robots are actually already in wide use for about a decade. There is even already an aftermarket for used milking robots in Europe. As far as I know they first fisinfect and then milk the cows. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnNGPsVdYSA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnNGPsVdYSA
platz 8y ago
So like interstellar
gwern 8y ago
> I remember reading years ago that there was some project to autonomously milk cows. The cows were taught to go into a special milking stall when they were ready to be milked. Each cow was RFID'd and even had their own Twitter handle that was posted to each time the cow was milked. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/technology/farm-technology-milkers-robots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/technology/farm-technolog...
jimmaswell 8y ago
Why would anyone choose to live in Manhattan when their job is entirely remote?
- CPLX 8y ago
  Because the rest of their life isn’t entirely remote.
- deanalevitt 8y ago
  I was living in NYC, working remotely for a few years when that exact question hit me. A few months later I was in Hawaii.
- baddox 8y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean. New York City is famously regarded as a great city for music, art, museums, theatre, cinema, comedy, architecture, food, nightlife, cultural diversity, and more. I have never heard the sentiment “my NYC job is so great, I just wish it were in another town.”
  - pizza 8y ago
    Rent is too damn high
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    High rent like pizza said as well as crowdedness, having to choose between transit and driving in really bad traffic, general city complaints. I've used the subways in NYC a few times and I really wouldn't like having to do that all the time. There is some great stuff there like the Museum of Natural History but I think I'd rather live in a surrounding suburb or something, or Hawaii like the other commenter suggested. On the transit subject, the lack of car reliance is nice in theory, but I honestly found my short experience of taking MTA subways around less enjoyable than driving. Very crowded, jerked so hard when it started moving that I almost fell over, and the walks between connections can be tiring if there's a rush to get there on time or it's a long distance (or both - running from one side of the PABT to the other isn't fun when you're not in great shape)
- 8y ago
marcosdumay 8y ago
> I'm not much of a rancher, so I don't know what those would be. Rotating pasture, making sure the cattle does not run away, assembling them for vaccination. Those are things that people can not do reliably on large scale, but surveillance and guide drones coupled with rfid tags can easily. I guess the largest current bottleneck is drone time on the air and maintenance.
baddox 8y ago
It seems like a wheeled or tracked drone would be much simpler and more reliable for herding sheep.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  I don't think there's anything that moves fast enough yet (over varied terrain).
- abraae 8y ago
  That is definitely not the case, at least not in NZ. This is the kind of terrain you might see:http://woolshed1.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-zealand-agricultural-history.html http://woolshed1.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-zealand-agricultur... If you got up close you'd find land slips, cracks, fallen trees and sheep shit. A wheeled vehicle would need to be at least the size of a quad bike.

mseidl 8y ago

Given how loud rotors are of flying quad copters this seems... it seems like this might be not that good.

allannienhuis 8y ago
dogs barking at animals at close range is pretty darn loud. Much of the time the drone is pretty high up, which is relatively quiet at ground level. Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big concern. That said, I think like many things, if reducing sound levels is important then over time it will be addressed - seems like it would be a good application of active noise dampening.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big concern. Animals are quite sensitive to noise.
  - allannienhuis 8y ago
    that's true.

sharky_sharkDog 8y ago

I have seen the nightmare hellscape of the future, and it is a drone made to behave like Sharky the shark dog.

nmstoker 8y ago

Good to be pushing the limits etc etc, but is this really at all close to being practical yet? Just think of the scale of NZ farms vs the DJI range. Unless they can land on remote charging stations dotted about the terrain it's going to run out of power far too quickly to explore much of the farm aside from a brief flyover. Back of the envelope calc: if an avg NZ farm is 252 hectares [2], and we charitably assume it's square and it's about 6.3km for a trip round the perimeter, yet the DJI flies for 31 minutes at 25kph [1], so roughly 13km, it could only do ~two laps (without stopping and presumably not accounting for cross winds) It gets worse if the farm isn't square (as seems likely in NZ terrain) and it gets much worse when you considering that livestock farms are bigger still than the overall average. [1] https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info [2] http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/ http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/

dan-robertson 8y ago
I think the technology is still useful as it is. I think normally farmers wouldn’t take a sheepdog all the way around the perimeter of a farm like that. Instead they would drive to the part where the sheepdog is needed and do the work there. One would imagine a drone would be useful in this scenario too. I think the main advantage with the current limited range would be for driving animals (something that wouldn’t routinely require high speed or long distances but might take a long time) and more localised surveys. I can certainly imagine eg taking the quad bike to different parts of the farm and just sending the drone up to look at/round up the sheep.
taneq 8y ago
I don't think they'd try to patrol the entire property on a single battery. More likely just fly out to do a spot check, return to base, swap batteries, etc. If your options are ride a quad bike out there (navigating terrain, fences etc.) or fly straight there and back at 60km/h+ I imagine the drone is a far quicker way to keep an eye on things. You can keep a Spark in the air almost indefinitely (only landing to swap batteries) with three batteries if you don't mind charging them while they're hot (shortens the battery life a bit) so I'd imagine a Mavic Pro would be able to do as well or better.

jobigoud 8y ago

Surely sheeps haven't evolved to respond specifically to dogs barking?

dan-robertson 8y ago
Most living sheep probably do know what a dogs bark sounds like, however
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Would they respond similarly to a DJI blasting Slayer music? That would make me move, at least!
  - dan-robertson 8y ago
    I’m not sure. Here’s some evidence that it doesn’t always work for cows: https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      HAAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH thank you so much for this, it was exactly what I was looking for... truly the empirical evidence we need. Needs more shrill screaming and the amplifier needs to be roboticized to run circles around them, of course.

pixelpoet 8y ago

I was already on the fence about replacing humans with robots for e.g. driving, but dogs? Why would anyone want to replace dogs with robots? Worst trade ever.

executivetech 8y ago
Dogs cost a lot to maintain, think about Vet expense and Food. Lithium batteries simply need electricity.
- mhh__ 8y ago
  How many dogs can you buy for the price of one drone? And what if it rains etc. Etc.
  - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
    Trained sheep dogs are £2k-5k Annual costs are around £500-1k They also require a significant time investment when not working.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lelf 8y ago
  Dogs don’t require charging every 20–30 minutes. Dogs can fly^Wrun without remote control.
  - allannienhuis 8y ago
    The dog's remote control is the whistle. :) I expect that at some point the utility of the robot/drone will outpace the utility of the dog in this role (and others). Wanting to hang on to our dogs isn't a bad thing, but I don't think we will be able to make as many arguments based on their utility. Instead we'll just have to accept the idea that the reasons for having them (and even working with them) will be cultural/emotional instead, which are perfectly good reasons. We have an Australian Shepherd as a family pet - they're amazing companions!

alex_duf 8y ago

Looks like a solution in search of a problem.

vamos_davai 8y ago

Oh no how could anyone foresee this happening? We don’t UBI for dogs!

dmix 8y ago
Indeed but if it’s anything like other social activist issues there will be far more people worried about the (cuter) animals than the stuff that affects humans.
vinayan3 8y ago
I know your comment is a joke but, if drones become a thing for herding then we'll just see less sheep dogs bred. This happened with sheep in the US after WW2. Other fibers had been introduced into the market which reduced wool demand.

erikig 8y ago

I really enjoyed watching the aerial video of the sheep and cattle, it was just sooo satisfying. I've been tinkering with ProcessingJS's Flocking visualizations and the similarity is striking: https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html

walrus01 8y ago

The drone in the picture has a maximum 27 minute flight time, and requires manually changing batteries, manually launching it. Not exactly something you'd want to sit around doing all day. Livestock guardians do not necessarily have to be dogs. Three llamas living with a herd of sheep will provide a great deal of defense against coyotes and mountain lions.

robocat 8y ago
> Livestock guardians This is New Zealand. The only thing that eats mammals here (apart from the local humans) is Austrosimulium (australense or ungulatum).
joshvm 8y ago
There's also a quote in the article about the farmer sitting indoors on a miserable day flying the drone. Firstly, it's unlikely it would be safe to fly in rain and or high wind. Secondly, in most countries it's illegal to fly beyond line of sight without a lot of paperwork (which basically nobody except the military, possibly law enforcement, and some large companies have). You would need to be in the field, watching the drone.

ohazi 8y ago

Just so that everybody is on the same page: https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8 https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8 The bar for sheep herding robots is ridiculously high. Border Collies are super smart.

phillc73 8y ago
Thank you. My first thought when reading this was that sheep dogs, the really good ones, don't typically bark. They are very patient and quiet. Barking is likely to send the sheep in the wrong direction. I owned a working cattle dog once (when I worked on a farm with cattle) and this dog did bark, too much! She wasn't a very good working dog because she'd spook the cattle with the barking. Ultimately, I'm not convinced a "barking" drone is really going to be very effective.
TimTheTinker 8y ago
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM (Welsh herdsmen put lights on sheep and play “pong” on a sloped hillside after dusk with the help of border collies.)
- dTal 8y ago
  That's incredibly impressive. I knew that sheepdogs were good but that level of control is unreal.
  - TimTheTinker 8y ago
    You should check out videos of sheepdog trial finalists. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354 Pretty impressive and fun to watch.

robotresearcher 8y ago

For history buffs, here’s a robot autonomously collecting ducks in a limited arena in 1998. Was the first autonomous robot sheepdog, I believe. Ducks are slower and cheaper than sheep, and flock very nicely as the video shows. https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM

FailMore 8y ago

Sad. I like dogs.

hotcrossbunny 8y ago

NZ cracked the robot sheepdog back in the 70s https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko

robocat 8y ago
I think that was actually using stolen Australian technology.

robocat 8y ago

Here's the 4m news video embedded in the article: https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU I love the way the sheep look like schools of fish (especially when they are on fast-mo).

laxd 8y ago

How about just getting a god damn dog you lazy ass imbeciles.

dang 8y ago
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

failrate 8y ago

As someone who grew upon a (hobby)sheep farm, this seems to miss the point. A good sheep dog is already an autonomous "drone". How autonomous? Mild example: our collie would frequently herd the sheep into the barn even before we realized the weather was turning. Extreme example: a Great Pyrenees moved into our farm from a neighboring farm that didn't have any herd animals. The neighbors just gave us the dog after the third time it moved in to our farm.

hbarka 8y ago

Poor sheep. They will have nightmares from the high-decibel drone of a drone. Will probably start getting genetic changes in their wool from the stress. Why disturb nature with that buzzing annoyance?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

misard 8y ago

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