Barking drones used on farms instead of sheep dogs

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.

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 [2] http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/