The Mathematics of Herding Sheep

From the article: "The findings could lead to the development of robots that can gather and herd livestock, crowd control techniques, or new methods to clean up the environment."

A simple robot sheepdog that gathers flocks of real ducks was demonstrated 16 years ago. Several related robots have been demonstrated since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tefXVXscNDM (video from 1998)

The 1998 robot sheepdog was developed using a simulation model of flocking behaviour, and found to work on real flocks first-try.

This new work adds a neat trick of heading for the most outlying flock creature if it gets too far away. This is a nice extension.

As demonstrated, herding breeds of dogs do have a method to their herding madness. But this seems to be an outcome of a herding breed's broader ability to do general ad hoc problem solving.

For one example, take the "dog wraps leash around object" problem. You know, walking the dog, dog on the leash lets a tree get between itself and you, dog is stumped how to proceed further. Herding breeds seem to have a higher percentage of success in figuring out how to undo the situation, where others stand there and look at you as if to say, "I'm stuck, fix it!" (Source: walking and training dogs at the local animal shelter.)

That particular behavior is not exclusive to herding breeds, as one of our pit bulls has this mastered to the point of knowing to avoid letting objects get between us in the first place. But she's otherwise dumb as a rock and wouldn't have the first clue what to do with a herd of animals (well, other than try to eat them) and gets stuck on other problems.

As for the robots, meh, dogs are a lot cheaper and more fun to play with when the work's done.

Here's the published paper in full: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/100/201407...

Link to the original university conducting the research:

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/media-centre/latest-research/sheepd...

i have watched these dogs work during trips to North Wales (mine, not the dogs'); in N. Wales, i believe the dogs are border collies (medium length black and white, ~ 10 - 20 kg). A few things in particular i was amazed by--first, the speed at which they are able to gather a previously grazing herd of sheep scattered over a a few hundred sq metres and get them moving briskly to some intended destination in well-ordered moving queue; second, each "team" (3-4 dogs) appeared to work in a tightly coordinated way; and also, i often saw a puppy as part of these teams, which suggested to me sheepdog skills are at least substantially learned from the older dogs.

I think wall street is using the same type of mathematics to herd the sheep of main street it should move in similar swarm like pattern movements.