Robots for Shearing Sheep

This is an account of a research project which took robots from their usual structured routines and successfully used them to reproduce the very human skill of sheep shearing. Originally ridiculed by international experts, the project is now hailed as an example of how clever robots can be. One of the great lessons of the project was the need for technical experts to be able to communicate with a wide variety of others, including funding agencies, shearers, farmers, the media and specialists in very different fields. Therefore this book, though written for experts and researchers, as far as possible uses non-specialist language. Technicalities and specialities are explained in separate sections where necessary, so that the book can be read by project managers or robotics specialists with equal interest.