When you are lucky enough to have a dog in your life, you tend to ignore some more one-sided aspects of the relationship. Even if you are strictly restrained about where you will dispose of your waste, your hairy friend is free to roam the yard and distribute his nuggets at will, and you are fully expected to take on the responsibility of cleaning. See what we have?
And so dog people sometimes rebel against this one-sided power structure, leaving it clean until later – often, much later, when offensive piles can be somewhat difficult to detect. So naturally, we now have this pup-shooting laser tarot to help you through your backyard cleaning session. It comes to us from [Caleb Olson], Who has used his latest stool monitor as a data source for exactly where each deposit is located in the yard. To point them out, he attached a laser pointer to a cheap robotic arm and used OpenCV to create bright green spots on each anus.
But wait, there’s more. [Caleb]Its code also optimizes his pope’s patrol path, reducing the amount of arduous walking he has to do to inspect each mound. And, the same pose assumptions algorithm that adorable watch [Twinkie] Which keeps track of his deposits [Caleb] Removes each from the worklist in turn. So now instead of a dog controlling his life, he is running a dog and a computer show Perfect.
We joke, because defecation, but really, it’s a pretty neat practice of machine learning. The robot arm looks a bit overkill, though – we thought it was easy to whip a simple two-servo torret.