Robot Sheepdog Project Achieves Automatic Flock Control

Abstract

This paper describes a mobile robot that can enter a circular arena, gather a flock of ducks and manouvre them safely to a specified goal position. A minimal simulation model of the ducks' flocking behaviour was developed and used as a tool to guide the design of a general flock-control algorithm. The algorithm was first tested in simulation then tranferred unchanged to a physical robot which succeeds in gathering a real flock of ducks. This is the first example of a robot system that exploits and controls an animal's behaviour to achieve a useful task. Robots successfully manipulate many objects in factories and laboratories. Research continues on manipulating objects with complex or variable shapes and dynamics eg. food products (Juste et al., 1997). Recent work in mobile robotics has focused on `adaptive behaviour ' in animals, in order to extend the abilities of robots (Maes, 1990) (Hallam and Hayes, 1994), and to better understand the processes occurring in real creatur...