Networked Cows : Virtual fences for controlling cows

Our goal is to develop computational approaches for studying groups of agents with natural mobility and social interactions. Such systems differ in many ways from engineered mobile systems because their agents can move on their own due to complex natural behaviors as well as under the control of the environment (for example drifting to follow wind patterns). We wish to model such systems using physical data and to use the models for controlling the movement of the mobile agents and the information propagation between them using virtual fences, implemented on smart networked collars attached to the animals. Our main motivation and application is in the agricultural domain. Herds of animals such as cattle are complex systems. There are interesting interactions between individuals, such as friendship, kinship, group formation, leading and following. There are complex interactions with the environment, such as looking for a water source in a new paddock by perimeter tracing along the fence and random walking within the perimeter. Such behaviors are well known to farmers but not so well documented. Furthermore, limited control can be exerted whose effect is to move the animals around. This could be greatly beneficial in terms of reducing the amount of expensive fence maintenance and mustering required by ranchers. In this work we combine robotics, networking and animal behavior to create a fence-less approach to herding cows called control by virtual fences. The cow society can be viewed metaphorically as well as physically as a network. By endowing each animal with the computation, sensing, and networking capabilities needed to drive virtual fencing we will obtain a networked system that can function as an information backbone for the group. Information can flow across this group to update individual parameters and programs (for example the motion plans for the virtual fences), coordinate tasks,