Autonomous mobile robot assisted herding

In this paper, we describe work that begins to address some of the issues related to developing an autonomous mobile robotic capability to assist humans with herding animals. A novel aspect of this work is the development of a capability to convey instructions to the robot via movements of a “toy human.” In this work, no other explicit form of communication from the human to the robot is required. Furthermore, the robot is able detect if the human is absent or is unable to herd, and to herd the animal autonomously if required. We developed a herding framework that is based on low stress herding techniques. The robot uses a pan-tilt-zoom camera and a laser ranging sensor to track the human and interpret the human’s movements. We conduct two sets of experiments that demonstrate autonomous and co-operative herding behaviour of the robot. We conclude by presenting experimental results that suggest our approach to developing a service robot with assistive herding capabilities holds promise for scaling to more complex and sophisticated tasks.