Robot 'Dog' Trials Sheep Herding and Orchard Inspection in New Zealand

A New Zealand company trialled a robot ‘dog’ to carry out agricultural activities including sheep mustering and an orchard inspection in a bid to automate laborious farming tasks.

In a collaboration with Boston Dynamics using their robot known as ‘Spot’, the four-legged machine navigates a pair of rural properties including difficult terrain by capturing 3D visualizations and other sensor data in their environment.

David Inggs, the CEO of the company Rocos, told Storyful the robot would be useful for providing farmers more up-to-date yield estimates and would make some practices safer and more efficient.

While the robot made an earnest attempt at mustering sheep, it was no match for the sheepdogs.

“Pet dogs are generally suspicious of Spot but the working dogs treated it no differently than they would a new farm bike, I think they realised their jobs are safe for the time being. Besides their incredible training the real dogs have generations of instinct that would be very hard to replicate in an AI system,” Rocos CEO David Inggs said on LinkedIn.

A Spot robot was recently trialled in a Singapore to roam a popular city park and remind people to keep a social distance from each other amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: Rocos via Storyful