The Graduate University for Advanced Studies or SOKENDAI, based at Hayama town, Kanagawa prefecture, has launched a new project to develop a device for scaring off harmful crows from farming areas by making them mistake artificial “crows’ conversation” for cries of wild crows with a crow-shaped drone of a small unmanned aerial vehicle.
A stuffed-crow robot installed with a loud speaker will soon have additional functions such as moving its neck. (SOKENDAI at Hayama town, Kanagawa prefecture)
The flying crow-shaped drone exchanges “artificial conversations” with a robot crow staying on the land. The conversations, which are recorded with sounds of crows’ cries produced by artificial intelligence (AI), are replayed through a built-in speaker of the stuffed-crow robot.
Built-in AIs of the drone and the crow robot can also distinguish cries of wild crows. And they send to wild crows a several kinds of messages such as “precaution” and “escaping.”
The SOKENDAI University has developed “two birds” of the crow-shaped drone and the stuffed-crow robot installed with a loud speaker.
If they succeed in practical uses of these crows, the device is expected to be an effective measure for preventing pre-harvest orchards and other farms from being harmed by wild crows.
Professors of the University plan to manufacture this device three years later in a joint research project with Koh Sueda, a research fellow of the National University of Singapore.