Swagbot might look like a drone on wheels, but it could be the shepherd of the future. The AI powered farmhand rolls around with real cows, assessing pasture health and the health of its herd.
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00:00This is Swagbot, and while it might look like a drone on wheels, it could be the shepherd
00:08of the future.
00:09The AI-powered farmhand rolls around with real cows, first being deployed in 2016 to
00:14take them autonomously from pasture to pasture.
00:17Now it's being upgraded and also includes a litany of sensors to track both pasture
00:20health so that the cows do not overgraze, but it also builds health profiles on each
00:25individual cow.
00:26And you can actually measure the property of the animal's motion as it's moving along,
00:31so what we call its gait, so how it's actually moving.
00:34And if you measure that information over a number of different days, you start to build
00:37up a characteristic profile of that animal.
00:40And from that, you can determine whether or not the animal is healthy or not healthy on
00:44a particular point in time along that path.
00:47This is University of Sydney Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Salah Sukaria.
00:52The pilot program is being done in Sydney, Australia.
00:55One of the world's leading producers of beef, and with 30 million cows being bred currently,
01:00pasture health is a major concern, as overgrazing can ruin soil, meaning having a better idea
01:05of what is going on all the time is critical, and Swagbot can do that.
01:10The population of the world is growing, and we have the same amount of land to feed that
01:16population.
01:17And so maximizing how much food we deliver for the same amount of imports, even less
01:21in terms of imports, is what's important.
01:23And the only way we can do that is with precision agriculture.