Experiments in Animal-Interactive Robotics

This thesis describes the development of an autonomous robot system that gathers a ock of ducks in a circular arena and manoeuvres them safely to a pre-determined goal position. In the process it establishes a methodology for developing robots that interact with animals. An important feature of this methodology is that it enables the development of a machine that can usefully interact with an animal without using the animal in the design process. Interacting with animals imposes strong constraints of real-time action, robustness and animal safety. A suitable arena, robot vehicle, control architecture and vision system are described. An animal-interactive robot must be robust with respect to the inevitable variations in behaviour between individual animals and even in the same animal over time. It is suggested that (a) animal-interactive robot controllers should exploit the underlying mechanisms of the subject animals' behaviour rather than the details of any particular animal or gro..