From Robots to Animals: Virtual Fences for Controlling Cattle

Authors:
Zack Butler;Peter Corke;Ron Peterson;Daniela Rus
Affiliations:
Computer Science Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623 USA;CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia;Dartmouth Computer Science Department, Hanover, NH 03755 USA;Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA
Venue:
International Journal of Robotics Research
Year:
2006

Citing 7
Cited 9

Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model

SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Artificial intelligence: a modern approach

Artificial intelligence: a modern approach
Robot sheepdog project achieves automatic flock control

Proceedings of the fifth international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior on From animals to animats 5
Automatically tracking and analyzing the behavior of live insect colonies

Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents
Hierarchic Social Entropy: An Information Theoretic Measure of Robot Group Diversity

Autonomous Robots
Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet

Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Wireless Sensor Devices for Animal Tracking and Control

LCN '04 Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks

Transforming Agriculture through Pervasive Wireless Sensor Networks

IEEE Pervasive Computing
Social Control of Herd Animals by Integration of Artificially Controlled Congeners

SAB '08 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior: From Animals to Animats
Model-based monitoring for early warning flood detection

Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
A sensor network for compression and streaming of GPS trajectory data

Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
Adaptive GPS duty cycling and radio ranging for energy-efficient localization

Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Review: The evolution of virtual fences: A review

Computers and Electronics in Agriculture
Memory based message efficient clustering (MMEC) for enhancement of lifetime in wireless sensor networks using a node deployment protocol

Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Communication, Computing & Security
Autonomous gathering of livestock using a multi-functional sensor network platform

Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors
Similarity search in 3D object-based video data

Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

We consider the problem of monitoring and controlling the position of herd animals, and view animals as networked agents with natural mobility but not strictly controllable. By exploiting knowledge of individual and herd behavior we would like to apply a vast body of theory in robotics and motion planning to achieving the constrained motion of a herd.In this paper we describe the concept of a virtual fence which applies a stimulus to an animal as a function of its pose with respect to the fenceline. Multiple fence lines can define a region, and the fences can be static or dynamic. The fence algorithm is implemented by a small position-aware computer device worn by the animal, which we refer to as a Smart Collar. We describe a herd-animal simulator, the Smart Collar hardware and algorithms for tracking and controlling animals as well as the results of on-farm experiments with up to ten Smart Collars.