Master Thesis - Autonomous herding of wild

animals with single UAV

Kishore Kumar, Jan-Jul 2023

Summary:
The objective of the thesis is the development of an algorithm that allows to herd a flock of
terrestrial animals using a single UAV. The herding phase starts with the UAV positioned
behind the animals in the direction of the wanted location for the animals to be guided to.
The algorithm works by keeping the animals under a certain distance between each other
while pushing them towards the “exit” position. Examples and related works can be found in
[1], [2], [3].

Deliverable:
An algorithm capable of gathering and repelling a group of terrestrial animals in a simulated
environment (using Gazebo, ROS, PX4) where the animals move according to a certain
behavior and when the UAV is close to them. The different scenarios are created varying the
following simulation parameters:
● Number of animals in the group.
● Position of the animals.
● Distance between animals in the group.
● Behavior of the animals when chased by the UAV.

Preliminary plan:
1. Literature review on state-of-the-art methods for repelling/herding animals with
UAVs. (January)
Review current techniques for herding problem and possible implementations to use as
baselines.
2. Implementation of “naive following” algorithm. (February)
This algorithm allows the UAV to simply chase the group of animals, without guiding them to
a specific place.
3. Implementation of “gather and repel” algorithm. (February-March)
This algorithm allows to guide the animals to a specific position chosen a priori. The
algorithm allows the UAV both to 1. keep the animals in the group close to each other and 2.
to guide them to the chosen position. The algorithm can be chosen among the baselines
found in the literature review as long as it satisfies the requirements 1 and 2.
4. Scientific contribution (March-April)
The thesis should bring a relevant novel contribution with respect to the literature in robotics
herding, for example an improvement with respect to a baseline algorithm. This can be
discussed during the development of the thesis.

5. Final testing - Experimental evaluation (April-May):

1. Succeed in 10 different simulation scenarios and report results of baseline and
proposed method.
 2. (Optional) Test 10 times in the real-world with real animals.

6. Thesis writing (May-June)

References:

[1] A Comprehensive Review of Shepherding as a Bio-Inspired Swarm-Robotics Guidance

Approach https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9099485
[2] Robotic Herding of a Flock of Birds Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8424544
[2] A Deep Hierarchical Reinforcement Learner for Aerial Shepherding of Ground Swarms:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-030-36708-4_54.pdf?pdf=inline%20link