If you hate picking up after your dog—
For dog owners in San Francisco, it can be quite an ordeal trying to find an apartment complex or flat that allows pets. For the lucky ones that do, there is the business of walking the dog so that your best four-legged friend can, well, do its business.
For those who dread the walk and the associated task, there’s good news; a robot can now help by picking up your pet’s poop for a cool $400K.
Such a deal
The PR2
Willow Garage, a robotics company, is selling its PR2 robot for anyone who can come up with the paltry sum of $400,000. Paltry, that is, for those who happen to make tens of millions of dollars. For the rest of us, we’ll have to settle for an iPhone 4S or Droid RAZR.
It does some other stuff too
The PR2 is programmable and can do various tasks such as cook, make sausages, bake cookies, fold laundry, and for the ultimate robotic trick, go get a nice cold beer for its owner.
Of course, asking your significant other or doing the tasks yourself is a bit cheaper than buying the PR2, but it isn’t quite as cool.
College is crap
Several industrious robotic researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering department decided to transform their PR2 into an automated pooper scooper by writing the appropriate code.
Their robot, affectionately named Graspy, can visually “see” objects and figure out what is poop and what is not.
Once it finds a treasured nugget, it summarily picks it up with a metal pooper scooper and dunks it into the bucket it carries along for the assignment.
He scoops, he scores! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
How does it know?
Graspy or at least the program that runs the robot, makes a visual identification based upon the color and size of the object and zeros in on the find.
The official name for the program developed by the University of Pennsylvania robotics department is:
Perception of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control of Object Pickup
Or POOP SCOOP for short.
You gotta love those funny scientists in white coats.
Why they did it
The official reason why the computer program was written was to “clear poop out of an open field.”
Almost batting a thousand
At the moment, the PR2 has a 95 percent rate of pooper scooper success. Not yet perfect, but the research team is working on it.
Not the most glamorous job in the world, but let’s face it, it’s all a bunch of crap anyway.
Written by: Frank Ling on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - 5:57 PM
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