Parrot drives robot buggy with beak -
An engineer has created a homing robot buggy capable of being driven around the home by his pet parrot.
Andrew Gray, a student at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the University of Florida, designed the BirdBuggy to solve a problem he was having with Pepper, his loud bird.
"Our parrot, when he's left alone, screams. It's ear piercing even if you're several rooms away," explained Gray to the university's WUFT radio station. Now Pepper can manoeuvre himself from room to room by standing on the box-like buggy's perch and manipulating a joystick with his beak.
The buggy was not the first attempt at solving the noise problem with technology. "What we normally do is spray him with a water bottle and it shuts him up for a little bit," said Gray. "So I built a voice-activated squirt gun. It worked really well at first, but then he started using it as a bird bath and would scream just to get squirted."
The new solution came when Gray decided to tackle the underlying separation issue rather than its squawky symptoms.
"What's the underlying issue? The problem is that he's not in the room with us. When he's in the room he's fine, so I thought 'how do I get him around the house?'"
The BirdBuggy's final design took Gray four months and includes infrared sensors to prevent Pepper barging into things and a type of homing mechanism which can be activated after Pepper has abandoned the craft, allowing the vehicle to locate and travel to its docking station using green and orange reference spheres.
Read more -
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/07/parrot-birdbuggy
An engineer has created a homing robot buggy capable of being driven around the home by his pet parrot.
Andrew Gray, a student at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the University of Florida, designed the BirdBuggy to solve a problem he was having with Pepper, his loud bird.
"Our parrot, when he's left alone, screams. It's ear piercing even if you're several rooms away," explained Gray to the university's WUFT radio station. Now Pepper can manoeuvre himself from room to room by standing on the box-like buggy's perch and manipulating a joystick with his beak.
The buggy was not the first attempt at solving the noise problem with technology. "What we normally do is spray him with a water bottle and it shuts him up for a little bit," said Gray. "So I built a voice-activated squirt gun. It worked really well at first, but then he started using it as a bird bath and would scream just to get squirted."
The new solution came when Gray decided to tackle the underlying separation issue rather than its squawky symptoms.
"What's the underlying issue? The problem is that he's not in the room with us. When he's in the room he's fine, so I thought 'how do I get him around the house?'"
The BirdBuggy's final design took Gray four months and includes infrared sensors to prevent Pepper barging into things and a type of homing mechanism which can be activated after Pepper has abandoned the craft, allowing the vehicle to locate and travel to its docking station using green and orange reference spheres.
Read more -
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/07/parrot-birdbuggy
