High-Tech ScareCrows
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High-Tech ScareCrows
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High-tech scarecrows -
A Canadian company has created 'scarebots' to ward off hungry birds
By JEFF PAPPONE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, August 7, 2003 - Page B8
OTTAWA -- Paul D'Andrea has nothing against little critters, but after years of seeing ravenous birds eat their way through his urban garden, the Ottawa man decided it was time to close the backyard buffet.
Despite trying just about everything to keep the hungry pests away from his modest vegetable patch, his produce continued to fill the bellies of his surprisingly resourceful adversaries.
Mr. D'Andrea soon found out he wasn't alone. "My brother owns a vineyard in the Okanagan Valley and he's got problems with birds eating his crops."
After his brother put out a distress call, Mr. D'Andrea, a data networking specialist and software developer formerly with Nortel Networks Corp. and Nuvo Networks, decided there might be a business opportunity in solving the problem. He founded Noble Vision Robotics about 18 months ago based on his recollection of seeing a robotic cat at a friend's house. "It set off a whole bunch of fireworks in my head and started me realizing that the processing power is there now and all the supporting technologies would allow me to build a viable system."
At about the same time, another friend introduced him to Paul Holden, a University of Ottawa graduate who had spent three years developing artificial intelligence to compete in Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournaments.
Mr. Holden immediately joined the startup as the company's chief robotics engineer and the pair began working on ways to adapt computer technology, robots, vision system and artificial intelligence to something a little more practical: scarecrow work.
The Noble Vision Robotics "iScarecrow" uses a stationary camera mounted on a pole to record the activity in a crop bed. The video feed is relayed wirelessly to a computer that searches the images for winged intruders. Because birds fly in a predictable path at a more-or-less constant speed, the software eliminates erratic wanderings of butterflies and the slower progress of high-flying airplanes.
After analyzing five consecutive video frames using a series of complex algorithms, the computer identifies movement that corresponds to the flight patterns of birds and springs into action. It sends a wireless signal to deploy the "scarebot" down a metal wire to a vicinity where the feathered intruder was spotted. The strange, shoebox-sized robot racing toward the bird at about 35 kilometres an hour is usually enough to scare the pest away.
For good measure, the scarebot also has an on-board digital MP3 audio player as part of its arsenal, which blasts bird distress calls at high volume. Often the birds take flight long before the robot reaches its destination.
Noble Vision tested the system in a Pakenham, Ont., blueberry farm for a week in late July as it prepared for beta trials at Inniskillin's Brae Burn Estate vineyard, scheduled to begin Aug. 25. It also used the demonstration to showcase the system to venture capitalists, which it hopes will be impressed enough to invest the $250,000 to $500,000 the company needs to move into production.
Although it's difficult to gauge losses of crops, the Cedar Hill Berry farm, where the company tested its wares, estimates it loses about $10,000 worth of blueberries annually to birds and other animals. A system with one camera and eight scarebots should cover one acre of crops at a cost of roughly $4,500.
While there are other technologies available, such as propane cannons and netting, they are more costly in the long run and usually ineffective, mostly because birds are smart enough to figure out that they aren't immediate threats.
"Birds get accustomed to the noise of the cannons and because they fire at a set time interval, the birds know it's coming and they aren't deterred after while -- in many cases, the blast becomes a dinner bell because the birds know they've got time to eat before the next one."
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