31–40 of 76 posts
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.
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.
Just imagine a future where all herding dogs have been replaced by robots. Dogs that have a built-in need to herd things, no longer having a job. They would tear the world apart in months burning off their energy.
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.
I give it a year before the enemy realized the flying wolf-thing has no teeth. Animals arent stupid when it comes to the predator-prey relationship. It is an old game.
The bar for sheep herding robots is ridiculously high. Border Collies are super smart.
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'…
Oh no how could anyone foresee this happening? We don’t UBI for dogs!
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.
I give it a year before the enemy realized the flying wolf-thing has no teeth. Animals arent stupid when it comes to the predator-prey relationship. It is an old game.
> 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, m…
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.
Given how loud rotors are of flying quad copters this seems... it seems like this might be not that good.
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.
Animals are quite sensitive to noise.
> 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, m…