Herding a Flock of Birds Approaching an Airport Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The problem of herding a flock of birds is posed in a graph theoretic framework. A novel algorithm, called the n-wavefront algorithm, Is developed for enabling a single unmanned aerial vehicle to herd a flock of birds to a desired point. The technique is applied to the problem of diverting a flock of birds approaching an airport away from a protected zone around the airport. The n-wavefront algorithm is demonstrated in simulation and compared with existing strategies using graph-based metrics.