Tag: HHH

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Robots that Spare Animals

Semi-autonomous machines, autonomous machines and robots inhabit closed, semi-closed and open environments, more structured environments like the household or more unstructured environments like cultural landscapes or the wilderness. There they encounter domestic animals, farm animals, working animals, and wild animals. These creatures could be disturbed, displaced, injured, or killed by the machines. Within the context of machine ethics and social robotics, the School of Business FHNW developed several design studies and prototypes for animal-friendly machines, which can be understood as moral and social machines in the spirit of these disciplines. In 2019-20, a team led by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel developed a prototype robot lawnmower that can recognize hedgehogs, interrupt its work for them and thus protect them. Every year many of these animals die worldwide because of traditional service robots. HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH), as the invention is called, could be a solution to this problem. This article begins by providing an introduction to the background. Then it focuses on navigation (where the machine comes across certain objects that need to be recognized) and thermal and image recognition (with the help of machine learning) of the machine. It also presents obvious weaknesses and possible improvements. The results could be relevant for an industry that wants to market their products as animal-friendly machines. The paper “The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project” is available here.

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The Robot Called HAPPY HEDGEHOG

The paper “The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project” by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, Emanuel Graf and Kevin Bollier was accepted at the AAAI Spring Symposia 2021. The researchers will present it at the sub-conference “Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild” at the end of March. The project was conducted at the School of Business FHNW between June 2019 and January 2020. Emanuel Graf, Kevin Bollier, Michel Beugger and Vay Lien Chang developed a prototype of a lawn mowing robot in the context of machine ethics and social robotics, which stops its work as soon as it detects a hedgehog. HHH has a thermal imaging camera. When it encounters a warm object, it uses image recognition to investigate it further. At night, a lamp mounted on top helps. After training with hundreds of photos, HHH can quite accurately identify a hedgehog. With this artifact, the team provides a solution to a problem that frequently occurs in practice. Commercial robotic mowers repeatedly kill young hedgehogs in the dark. HAPPY HEDGEHOG could help to save them. The video on informationsethik.net shows it without disguise. The robot is in the tradition of LADYBIRD.

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Another Animal-friendly Machine

Between June 2019 and January 2020 the project HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH) was implemented at the School of Business FHNW. Initiator and client was Oliver Bendel. In the context of machine ethics, the students Emanuel Graf, Kevin Bollier, Michel Beugger and Vay Lien Chang developed the prototype of a lawnmower robot that stops working as soon as it discovers a hedgehog. HHH has a thermal imaging camera. If it encounters a warm object, it further examines it using image recognition. At night a lamp mounted on top helps. After training with hundreds of photos, HHH can identify a hedgehog quite accurately. Firstly, another moral machine has been created in the laboratory, and secondly, the team provides a possible solution to a problem that frequently occurs in practice: commercial lawnmower robots often kill baby hedgehogs in the dark. HAPPY HEDGEHOG could help save them. The video on youtu.be/ijIQ8lBygME shows it without casing; a photo with casing can be found here. The robot is in the tradition of LADYBIRD, another animal-friendly machine.