Australia, we hear, is a big place. All that space is nice to have if you’re raising cattle, except for the fact that you’ve got to keep track of them all somehow. For ranchers, this is a lot of work, and for cattle, it means that they don’t get checked on very regularly. This would be a good opportunity for robots to step in and offer some assistance, but the problem is most robots would be crazy to try getting themselves around the kind of terrain that Australia is made of.
In order to tackle the hills, dales, fields, cliffs, rivers, swamps, crocodiles, platypuses, echidnas, koalas, quolls, emus, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and dingoes (to name just a few common obstacles in Australia), researchers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney led by Dr. Salah Sukkarieh have designed and tested an all-terrain robot called SwagBot that’s designed to be able to drive over almost anything while helping humans manage their ranchland.
via IEEE Spectrum
Image: Australian Centre for Field Robotics
