Dario Floreano, Dominik Natter, Fabrizio Schiano, Davide Zambrano
Pigeons may transmit diseases to humans and cause damages to buildings, monuments, and other infrastructure. Therefore, several control strategies have been developed, but they have been found to be either ineffective or harmful to animals and often depend on human operation. This study proposes a system capable of autonomously detecting and deterring pigeons on building roofs using a drone. The presence and position of pigeons were detected in real time by a neural network using images taken by a video camera located on the roof. Moreover, a drone was utilized to deter the animals. Field experiments were conducted in a real-world urban setting to assess the proposed system by comparing the number of animals and their stay durations for over five days against the 21-day- trial experiment without the drone. During the five days of experiments, the drone was automatically deployed 55 times and was significantly effective in reducing the number of birds and their stay durations without causing any harm to them. In conclusion, this study has proven the effectiveness of this system in deterring birds, and this approach can be seen as a fully autonomous alternative to the already existing methods.
2022
