The thing about taking your dogs out to public areas is that you’ve got to be responsible when it comes to picking up their poop. After all if you don’t like it if another person were to poop in the park in the open, how is leaving behind your dog’s poop any different, right? Unfortunately not all dog owners feel this way, or maybe sometimes it goes unnoticed.
This means that there is a chance that your park could be littered with scatterings of dog poop. However Dutch entrepreneur Gerben Lievers has decided to do something about it, and he has done it using the power of drones where these drones will actually fly around looking for dog poop to scoop up and dispose of.
Lievers’ team has created a drone prototype called the Watchdog 1 which uses thermal image to locate fresh dog poop. After identifying the droppings, it will then send the GPS coordinates to a ground-based robot called the Patroldog 1 which will then roll itself over and pick it up. As for poop that has gone cold after a few days, the team uses image recognition that trains the drone to keep an eye out for stale poop.
According to Lievers, “The form and shape may be different with each one, but when you have a database with enough training images it’s possible…It may be that people will need to send us pictures of the poo of their dog in order to train our machines to be better.” It does feel like a waste to using so much resources just to pick up poop, but we guess it’s still a pretty valid application of the technology all the same.
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