Abstract
We study social control of a cow herd in which some of the animals are controlled by a sensing and actuation device mounted on the cow. The control is social in that it aims at exploiting the existing gregarious behavior of the animals, rather than controlling each individual directly. As a case study we consider the open-loop control of the herd’s position using location-dependent stimuli. We propose a hybrid dynamical model for capturing the dynamics of the animals during periods of grazing and periods of stress. We assume that stress can either be induced by the sensing and actuation device or by social amplification due to observing/overhearing nearby stressed congeners. The dynamics of the grazing part of the proposed model have been calibrated using experimental data from 10 free-ranging cows, and various assumptions on the animal behavior under stress are investigated by a parameter sweep on the hybrid model. Results show that the gregarious behavior of the animals must be increased during stress for control by undirected stimuli to be successful. We also show that the presence of social amplification of stress allows for robust, low-stress control by controlling only a fraction of the herd.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Vaughan, R., Sumpter, N., Henderson, J., Frost, A., Cameron, S.: Robot control of animal flocks. In: Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (ISIC), pp. 277–282. IEEE Press, Piscataway (1998)
Quigley, T., Sanderson, H., Tiedemann, A., McInnis, M.: Livestock control with electrical and audio stimulation, June 1990. Rangelands (1990)
Tiedemann, A., Quiqley, T., White, L., Lauritzen, W., Thomas, J., McInnis, M.: Electronic (fenceless) control of livestock, United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Tech. Rep. PNW-RP-510 (January 1999)
Anderson, D., Hale, C.: Animal control system using global positioning and instrumental animal conditioning, US Deparment of Agriculture, Tech. Rep. US Patent 6,232,880 (May 2001)
Anderson, D.: Virtual fencing - past, present and future. The Rangeland Journal 29, 65–78 (2007)
Halloy, J., Amé, J.-M., Detrain, G.S.C., Caprari, G., Asadpour, M., Correll, N., Martinoli, A., Mondada, F., Siegwart, R., Deneubourg, J.-L.: Social integration of robots in groups of cockroaches to control self-organized choice. Science 318(5853), 1155–1158 (2007)
Caprari, G., Colot, A., Siegwart, R., Halloy, J., Deneubourg, J.-L.: Building mixed societies of animals and robots. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 12(2), 58–65 (2005)
Schwager, M., Detweiler, C., Vasilescu, I., Anderson, D., Rus, D.: Data-driven identification of group dynamics for motion prediction and control. Journal of Field Robotics (to appear, 2008)
Butler, Z., Corke, P., Peterson, R., Rus, D.: From robots to animals: Virtual fences for controlling cattle. I. J. Robotic Res. 25(5-6), 485–508 (2006)
Lazo, A.: Social segregation and the maintenance of social stability in a feral cattle population. Animal Behavior 48, 1133–1141 (1994)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Correll, N., Schwager, M., Rus, D. (2008). Social Control of Herd Animals by Integration of Artificially Controlled Congeners. In: Asada, M., Hallam, J.C.T., Meyer, JA., Tani, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 10. SAB 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5040. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69134-1_43
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69134-1_43
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69133-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69134-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)