Quacking good idea…
Quacking good idea…
ANIMALS like machines better than humans, says Silsoe Research Institute. Recent research, it claims, has shown that animals find machines less stressful – a revelation which has prompted three post-graduate students to develop a robot sheep dog.
Well almost. Rover, as the robot is called, is claimed to be a world first. Comprising a component-packed vertical cylinder on wheels, it is currently confined to herding ducks on short grass rather than sheep on Snowdon.
Even so, there is no belittling the technology involved in creating a robot capable of gathering ducks without human input – technology which the designers hope can be expanded in due course to other interactive systems.
The electrically powered robot can accelerate to about 9mph (faster than ducks) and measures 28cm high by 44cm wide (larger than ducks), and is covered in plastic and mounted on rubber springs (softer than ducks).
Two further ingredients are required for the system to work – a camera and a computer. In action, images from the camera are analysed by the computer programme to discover the positions of the robot and the ducks.
The Robot Sheepdog Project is a collaboration between SRI and the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Oxford.
Rover the duck herder in action. The latest technology from UKresearchers could be expanded to include other animal-interactive systems.