Automated livestock herding
Move the mob without the quad and the gate
A drone walks a mob from one grazing block to another on a route you approved, inside limits you set, and stops if it cannot do it calmly.
What this costs today
Every rotational graziers day has a move in it: fresh cover, a gate, a mob that would rather stay. It is twenty minutes and two people on a good day, and on a bad one it is an animal on a road at six in the morning after a fence has gone down. The blocks furthest from the yard get moved late for the same reason they get checked least.
Watch the controller do it
The module that decides where the aircraft sits runs in the open, against a modelled paddock, on this site. Six scenarios: a rotation move, a narrow gate, a road on the headland, ewes with lambs, a mob with flighty animals in it, and one the controller stops rather than finish.
Open the playgroundEvery scenario is generated deterministically, so the figures on it are the same ones asserted in the test suite rather than a good run somebody kept. That is the whole reason it is published: a claim about how a drone behaves around livestock is worth nothing if you cannot check it.
How the flight runs
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Plan
A route is drawn from the block the mob is on, through the gate, onto the block it is going to, with the ground it must be kept off marked.
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Authorise
You look at the route and say yes. That freezes the limits the move is flown under and opens a window it has to happen in.
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Drive
The aircraft works behind the mob at a set distance, climbing to take pressure off rather than pressing harder when they quicken.
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Answer for it
The record says how close it came, how fast they moved, how high it had to work and who was left behind.
What the aircraft carries
- Zoom RGB camera
- Radiometric thermal camera
- Directional speaker
- RTK positioning
Whenever the rotation is due, proposed overnight and authorised in the morning.
What you receive
- Approved route per move
- Head count on arrival
- Straggler list
- Welfare record per move
- Grazing rotation log
What it measures
Readings this capability produces on your fields. Measurements, not promises.
- Closest the aircraft came against its standoff
- Fastest the mob moved against its limit
- Minutes under pressure
- Animals left behind per move
- Moves stopped and why
Where this carries the most weight
All use cases-
Grassland and silage
Thermal fawn searches ahead of first cut, sward quality mapping, and reseeding where the ground has gone back.
Fields of 2 to 40 hectares, flown at dawn.
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Dairy and grazing livestock
Daily head counts, fence line inspection and flagged animals, without the drive to every outlying block.
Grazing platforms of 20 to 300 hectares, docks placed by battery range.
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Cooperatives and large estates
Fleet coverage across scattered blocks, comparable numbers between holdings, and reporting that rolls up cleanly.
2,000 to 40,000 hectares across scattered member blocks.