University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) students have taught robodogs new tricks, developing a voice-command app that allows the machines to herd sheep under the direction of a human handler.<\/p>\n
The upgraded Unitree Go2 robodogs will make their public debut alongside livestock at the Ekka from August 8-16, bringing a Jetsons-style glimpse of the future to Queensland\u2019s largest agricultural show.<\/p>\n
The project builds on previous UniSC research that trained robodogs to herd sheep autonomously using cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
But project supervisor Dr Erica Mealy said the latest advances came after listening to the people most likely to use the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough the robodogs were originally intended to operate autonomously, working-dog handlers gave feedback indicating they wanted to remain in control,\u201d Dr Mealy said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRather than rely solely on automation, this allows a different, user-led experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted the robodog to stop when a handler said \u2018stop\u2019, or flank the back of the flock when a handler gave a certain command.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like when we were first approached, the aim here is to assist with a practice which can be costly, labour-intensive and physically demanding.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
UniSC honours student Abdullah al Muhsin said the project centred on a web-based app that lets users issue commands from a phone or laptop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe app listens to what you\u2019re saying, recognises specific commands and sends those instructions to the robodog,\u201d Mr al Muhsin said.<\/p>\n
The system uses Google Chrome\u2019s built-in speech-recognition technology to recognise commands including \u201cstop\u201d, \u201caway\u201d and \u201ccome by\u201d.<\/p>\n
Spoken commands are converted into text and transmitted to the robodog via a WebSocket API, where software running on an onboard NVIDIA Jetson computer translates them into movement in real time.<\/p>\n
Mr al Muhsin said the software was designed to work with any user rather than being trained to recognise a specific voice.<\/p>\n
About 30,000 people a day are expected to watch the UniSC robodogs perform in the Ekka main arena.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) students have taught robodogs new tricks, developing a voice-command app that allows…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-844878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}