Learning Models of Animal Behaviour for a Robotic Sheepdog

To firthcr the asr! of machine vision in animal-relat~d t a s b such m~ automated monito~lqg, an un-iier.stonding of the behaviour of the animals in their ensrtmnment is rcqarired. This paper d e s c ~ b e s an application , the Robotic Sheepdog, whtch exploits animal be-haviozrr to a c h i e v ~ i1.9 goal. We pres~nt a method of au-tonnticnlly mtmcting a model of animal behaviour that ijq deern,~d more appropsiafe than an alternate rule-based ~ n l t ~ t i o n , and dpscribe Iaoul this can be t ~ s e d to deternine a IikeZzhood of future e v e ~ f s. The application of machine vision techniques to the domain of animals is relativ~lv unexplor~d compared with ot,hrr areas of rrnmplrter vision research, despitp i t s obvious potmt ial. Applications such as Schnfi~id's [I] rlsr of a vision spst.ern to d ~ t r r r n i n ~ automatically a pig's wright by thr surface area of the pig observed in an image could prove very useful to the agricultural industry. One reason for a Tack of animal related applications is an insufficient understanding of the animaIs be-havianr wittiin their environment. S i m p l ~ rulebased spstcms of animal hehaviour can be used to give visually appealing results (for example, animations of animal flocking [2]), but these do not necessarily portray true hehaviour. In this paper, we describe how a model of animal behaviour can b p learnt automat~icdly from irnag~ se-qnencPs. and applied to predict flitme khaviour from a recent history of animal motion. The work forms part of the Rohot.ic Sheepdog Proj~ct [3]; an investigation into animal interactive robotics. The aim of the project is to demonstrate an autonomous rokot system that can successfully manipulate a group of animals to some pr+-deterrnin~d goal, by exploiting thp animals' adaptivp behaviour. As a robotic task this differs significantly from previous work combining robots and animals, where animal behaviour is deliberately rninimis~d by physical restraint 141. The task of the shpepdog was chosen due to the strong interaction between the dog, shepherd and flock animals. Using ducks instead of shwp allows us to experiment on a conveniently small scale, in a controll~d indoor environment. In order to successfuFly exploit the behaviour inherent to the animals, a model of the Iikely reaction of the …