This AI-Powered Robo Farmhand Herds Cows & Assesses Pasture Health for Grazing

Amaze Lab

Swagbot might look like a drone on wheels, but it could be the shepherd of the future. The AI powered farmhand rolls around with real cows, assessing pasture health and the health of its herd.

Transcript

00:00This is Swagbot, and while it might look like a drone on wheels, it could be the shepherd

00:08of the future.

00:09The AI-powered farmhand rolls around with real cows, first being deployed in 2016 to

00:14take them autonomously from pasture to pasture.

00:17Now it's being upgraded and also includes a litany of sensors to track both pasture

00:20health so that the cows do not overgraze, but it also builds health profiles on each

00:25individual cow.

00:26And you can actually measure the property of the animal's motion as it's moving along,

00:31so what we call its gait, so how it's actually moving.

00:34And if you measure that information over a number of different days, you start to build

00:37up a characteristic profile of that animal.

00:40And from that, you can determine whether or not the animal is healthy or not healthy on

00:44a particular point in time along that path.

00:47This is University of Sydney Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Salah Sukaria.

00:52The pilot program is being done in Sydney, Australia.

00:55One of the world's leading producers of beef, and with 30 million cows being bred currently,

01:00pasture health is a major concern, as overgrazing can ruin soil, meaning having a better idea

01:05of what is going on all the time is critical, and Swagbot can do that.

01:10The population of the world is growing, and we have the same amount of land to feed that

01:16population.

01:17And so maximizing how much food we deliver for the same amount of imports, even less

01:21in terms of imports, is what's important.

01:23And the only way we can do that is with precision agriculture.

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