
Barking drones used on farms instead of sheep dogs - howard941
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018685575/barking-drones-used-on-farms-instead-of-sheep-dogs
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samcday
> 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.

~~~
jimmaswell
Why would anyone choose to live in Manhattan when their job is entirely
remote?

~~~
baddox
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.”

~~~
jimmaswell
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)

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pixelpoet
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
Dogs cost a lot to maintain, think about Vet expense and Food.

Lithium batteries simply need electricity.

~~~
lelf
Dogs don’t require charging every 20–30 minutes.

Dogs can fly^Wrun without remote control.

~~~
allannienhuis
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!

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ohazi
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.

~~~
TimTheTinker
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
That's incredibly impressive. I knew that sheepdogs were good but that level
of control is unreal.

~~~
TimTheTinker
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.

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failrate
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.

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walrus01
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.

~~~
joshvm
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.

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hotcrossbunny
NZ cracked the robot sheepdog back in the 70s
[https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko](https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko)

~~~
robocat
I think that was actually using stolen Australian technology.

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erikig
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)

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nmstoker
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
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.

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

~~~
allannienhuis
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
> Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big
> concern.

Animals are quite sensitive to noise.

~~~
allannienhuis
that's true.

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misard
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)

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alex_duf
Looks like a solution in search of a problem.

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robotresearcher
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)

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robocat
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).

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

~~~
dan-robertson
Most living sheep probably do know what a dogs bark sounds like, however

~~~
anoncoward111
Would they respond similarly to a DJI blasting Slayer music?

That would make me move, at least!

~~~
dan-robertson
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
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.

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

~~~
dmix
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.

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FailMore
Sad. I like dogs.

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hbarka
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?

